Uncertainty and Possibility

New Approaches to Future Making in Design Anthropology

Yoko Akama, Sarah Pink, Shanti Sumartojo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000181111
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Uncertainty and possibility are emerging as both theoretical concepts and fields of empirical investigation, as scholars and practitioners seek new creative, hopeful and speculative modes of understanding and intervening in a world of crisis.This book offers new perspectives on the central issues of uncertainty and possibility, and identifies new research methods which take advantage of disruptive and experimental techniques. Advancing a practical agenda for future making, it reveals how uncertainty can be engaged as a generative 'technology' for understanding, researching and intervening in the world. Drawing on key themes in creative methodologies, such as making, essaying, inhabiting and attuning, chapters explore contemporary sites of practice. The book looks at maker spaces and technology design, the imaginaries of architectural design, the temporalities of built cultural heritage, and interdisciplinary making and performing. Based on the authors' own academic work and their applied research with a range of different organizations, Uncertainty and Possibility outlines new opportunities for research and intervention. It is essential reading for students, scholars and practitioners in design anthropology and human-centred design.

1

Approaching Uncertainty

Figure 1.1 A Design+Ethnography+Futures workshop commencing. Photo by Yoko Akama.

In a contemporary world where our hopes are ongoingly crushed by global politics and eroded by everyday life circumstances, uncertainty is often perceived as an increasingly prominent feature of existence, combined with imagined possible worlds of horror, fear and despair. These are challenging times. We are daily reminded of this through news of terrorist attacks, refugees and environmental crisis. Faced with such an apocalyptic moment the temptation is to seek a utopian future in which we might depend on tangible and ethical truths as a haven of safety. Yet the fact is, whether we pin our hopes on a better world situated in a time to come or pitch our fears into the terror of the next few years, the future is contingent, uncertain and unknowable. Uncertainty – however unwelcome and blamed for crisis, insecurity vulnerability and indecision – is constant, ongoing and continual. Uncertainty is a way of being in and knowing the world that societies consistently seek to ameliorate, mitigate against, remove or deny – usually without success.

This book is for academics and practitioners who are seeking new and interdisciplinary ways to approach and engage with this world because we are tasked (or pressured) with creating ‘better’ futures together. This is often requested with impatience for results and outcomes. Society’s desires for quick fixes and easy digest is eroding our ability to be resilient. This includes designers, anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, activists, policymakers and those working in cognate interdisciplinary areas and anyone interested in processes of organizational change. But what does future-making mean? How do we go about it?

The authors of the book are scholars in design, anthropology and geography. We practice along the boundaries of each field by blending, borrowing, hacking and remixing various theories and approaches to activate them in the contexts in which we work. A common thread that runs through all our practices is the interventions we undertake with people to generate insights concerning everyday phenomena. This might include exploring ways of using, responding to and making sense of mundane activities, emerging technologies or engaging with urban, social, spatial and environmental changes. Some interventions are intentional to catalyse awareness and preparedness for natural disasters or to build respectful sovereign relationships among Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Others involve seeking new ways to collaborate with health professionals, local governments, cultural institutions or technology companies. Such work changes things, and we are immersed and implicated in these changes. As researchers and change-makers, we help people become aware of hidden dimensions, surface questions buried in deeply held assumptions, provide alternative perspectives and we ask what could be done differently. In such moments, we grapple with uncertainty constantly, whether it is our lack of understanding the extent of complex issues or our partners in the project who are often unsure about what they are doing or how to do things in new ways. Acknowledging that uncertainty, paradoxically, plays a disruptive and generative role in our work, as we draw upon an accumulation of our experiences and thinking, and pursue how uncertainty can be embraced by turning it into focused enquiry and exploration.

Through this work we began to ask, what if we take uncertainty and put it at the core of our investigatory and change-making practice? This book does just that. In what follows, we acknowledge uncertainty as being core to our existence, a dimension that cannot be removed. Instead of staying with its oft-negative association, we have come at it with a different attitude. We examine how uncertainty has been conceptualized in existing scholarship and practice and how a re-figuring of its meaning and potential might enable theoretical advances and new forms of practice and understanding. Most centrally, we ask: how might we harness uncertainty, to move forward with it into futures so we are vigilant of our blind hope for ‘better’ experiences when we are intervening in change? Uncertainty, we argue, brings with it possibilities. It does not close down what might happen yet into predictive untruths, but rather opens up pathways of what might be next and enables us to creatively and imaginatively inhabit such worlds with possibilities (Figure 1.1). This is not to deny that there are many forces in the world that invite us to imagine much less than meaningful futures, and we emphasize that this book is not a naive invitation to better world-making. Hope is not blind optimism, argues the activist and writer Rebecca Solnit (2016: xii), so this means we need to have our eyes and our senses fully open ‘in the spaciousness of uncertainty’ because hope calls for action. This action, we propose, is a methodology that enables us to consider futures and change-making as part of processual worlds of uncertainty and possibility. Here, by change-making we do not mean a solutions-based approach or formulate cause-and-effect. Rather we see change-making as a form of intervention in a process that involves the opening up of many possibilities. In doing so we create a theoretical and methodological framework for the engagement of uncertainty as a technology for the making of possibilities.

We tackle this challenge through a discussion of a workshop methodology (Figure 1.2). It is theoretically framed and structured, but open enough to itself emerge in different forms. These are shown through a series of examples, each of which brings to the fore a key dimension of the methodology. In demonstrating the workshop theory, method and practice, the book sets it up as one example among many of how uncertainty and possibility might be conceptualized and put into practice for change-making. We develop this specifically as a workshop methodology that combines principles and approaches from co-design, design anthropology and creative practice research to explore an interdisciplinary approach that does not cede dominance to the theory or practice of any one discipline. This methodology, we argue, is not only suitable for the development of participatory or collective workshop activities, but its principles can equally be applied to a number of change-making approaches and processes.

Figure 1.2 A collaborative practice as cat’s cradle, performed by Anne Galloway and Helen Addison-Smith during Design+Ethnography+Futures workshop in 2012. Photo by Yoko Akama.

In this chapter we introduce the themes of emergence, intervention and futures that run through this book. In doing so we situate the workshop as an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses and blends perspectives and ways of knowing largely from ethnography and design.

Emergence and modes of engagement

At the core of this book and central to our understanding of uncertainty is an acknowledgement that we live in and grapple with worlds that are ongoingly emergent and changing configurations of things and processes. In such a world we have no basis upon which to be confident that we can know what will happen next in the immediate or far future, or that we can take any measures that could be absolutely guaranteed to determine or change our futures. In this sense both future-making and change-making become problematic concepts when treated through conventional modes of temporality. We alone cannot make futures because we are not dictators with perfect authority and power, or equipped with what is needed to intervene in worlds that are not known. We cannot make changes in isolation to the present because the present will not stay still long enough to be changed; it is always slipping away as the past. When we recognize that we are part of such a world, our only option is to participate more attentively in its changing. We can think of ourselves as moving forward with it, in ways that are open, responsive and with care. This book therefore does not provide a recipe for change-making, but rather offers a way of thinking about how we can move forward together. The central task of this book is to explore how uncertainty can be transformative, how we attune to and engage with it more attentively as part of our practice in change-making processes, and how uncertainty might be harnessed as a technology for producing new and open ways of understanding, making and imagining in the world.

In this sense, we attend to the possibility of what we call moving beyond. This is a useful attitude for us in many ways. It signals a pursuit of a future-oriented approach to explore what could be rather than what is or was, by speculating and re-imagining normative structures, boundaries and practices. But, it does not seek to predict futures that can be intervened in, instead creating many possibilities. Such attitudes are carried into our encounters when openness is lacking or not welcome. Thus, moving beyond refers to a willingness to fall into and engage with a possibility beyond our scope of tangible knowing and feeling. Possibilities are not closed products or even templates – they are instead open concepts, leaky and porous that have, and lead to, many starting points. Such emergent phenomena cannot be analysed or predicted, because they are not objects, but they can be attuned to and even welcomed.

Notions of emergence can be found in various forms within many existing literatures, featuring in dynamic systems from biology, physics and economics to organizational management. Indeed as noted by complexity theorist Jeffrey Goldstein (1999), the construct of ‘emergence’ was a useful reminder for the sciences that always dealt with phenomena without perfect knowledge, yet contested as merely a ‘provisional’ term that was useful only until a better theory came along. Our understanding of uncertainty draws from anthropological renderings which are themselves derived from the practice in anthropological ethnography of immersing oneself in worlds where we do not know what will happen next. As Bill Maurer (2005: 4) explains, ‘The point of emergence is that you do not know where it is going … but to go along for the ride, in mutual, open-ended and yet limited entanglements.’ The focus in much anthropological ethnography on following the processes, persons and things that we seek to understand is coherent with such an approach.

Both anthropology and design are fields that acknowledge the importance of situated, embodied and lived accounts, rather than those of a detached observer, and they see their positions as already entangled within and implicated in the sites they perform (Suchman 2002). In particular, in design anthropology, the notion of emergence has become increasingly central through the work of Smith and Otto (2016: 21–2) who emphasize that ‘the present is always in a state of emergence’ and suggest that ‘design anthropological interventions might function to condense or accelerate time in order to explore and understand the emergent and the potential futures and imaginations it may hold or, in other words, to make virtual experiments on the emergent’. Echoing this positioning, Akama (2015: 262) describes how designing collaboratively with people (co-design) is to immerse in emergence and chance while attuning into ‘slippery, un-namable tones and expressions that can only be sensed through our feelings and bodily encounters in relation to other people, materials, and entities’ so that we embrace that we are creating, transforming and becoming together among this heterogeneity. This notion of the perceiver transforming while being transformed by their interventions and surrounding conditions is a significant ontological shift in co-design to articulate ‘what it’s like to be immersed in the moments of change and how this is constantly evolving and becoming’ (Akama 2015: 264), going beyond epistemic conventions we often see in discourses of Actor Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies that only describe external and observable dynamics of inter-relations. This means in co-design, we re-situate ourselves in interrelatedness. The addition of the two letters of ‘co’ in co-design signals ‘an openness to embrace the influence, interventions, disruptions, tensions and uncertainties brought to bear by other things and people. It requires the designer to step into the “in-between” space that is dynamic, emergent and relational’ (Akama and Prendiville 2013: 32).

This emphasis on emergence and the relational creates a focus on liminal ambiguous in-betweens of co-designing that Akama (2015) critiques are often left out in written accounts due to conventions in academic papers and scientific legacy that privilege empirical ‘matters of fact’ (Latour 2008), because such in-betweens cannot be captured on video or transcripts. In this book we propose a series of ways to engage differently with this problem, so that workshop processes that are acknowledged as emergent maintain this sense of movement. One approach suggested by Akama (2015) is to reinscribe this into our reporting through fictocritical writing and brief-but-vivid narratives. Following this, in Chapter 6 we bring together this idea of immersing in emergence and transforming together through the discussion of a workshop called Essaying the FabPod, led by David Carlin, a creative writer in nonfiction. This chapter unpacks the ‘essaying’ workshop methodology that was developed with another creative writing colleague Francesca Rendle-Short, and was enacted at the workshop for participants to imagine, encounter and propose new relationships to an existing architectural structure, the FabPod.

Chapter 6 illustrates the components of moving beyond. Uncertainty and moving beyond are perhaps more obviously represented in the creation of possibilities through creative writing. However, there is a strong argument for rethinking how the emergent qualities of photography and video can be understood as and engaged for more-than-documentation. These technologies are a feature of our workshop methodology and to the way emergence is understood. As Pink, Akama and Fergusson (2017) have argued elsewhere, a ‘blended practice’ that combines design documentation with video ethnography techniques enables a way of thinking about lens-based media that is not about capturing what is before the camera or to create a closed objectification of what was in the world. Rather by rethinking our uses of the camera as forms of movement in and through the world, we can conceptualize video and photography as media that are capable of acknowledging the uncertainty of what is to come, which is to open up the possibility of what is unknowable to us. This idea is based on Pink’s earlier rethinkings of video as a trace through the world (Pink 2011; Pink and Leder Mackley 2012). This involves understanding video recording as a trace that a person and camera make through the sensory, emotional, material and digital environments in their forward movement. Following this understanding, when we view video we do not ‘play it back’ to see a previous moment in time from which we simply watch the unfolding of a recent (or not so recent) past. Instead we continue to move forward with that recording into new and previously unknown and perhaps unanticipated forms of experience and knowing, that is, as part of emergent worlds. This requires a shift from those design documentation and traditional anthropological forms of recording that are often too concerned with registering and storing what has happened, with the aim to have a record of a workshop activity. Indeed it is not only viewing previously shot video or images that requires a sense of moving forward, but also the action of doing video and photographic ethnography as conceptualized by Pink (2013; 2015) involves an engagement with the possible, since the video maker or photographer who ‘follows’ others does not in fact simply follow. Taking this further, we call for a mode of video and photographic recording that acknowledges the possible with things as they happen, and the ongoing emergent imaginative affects that are part of the process of making lens-based images: the visual ethnographer needs to ongoingly imagine possible immediate futures in order to direct the use of the camera. This understanding makes the temporalities of photography and video both more complex and appropriate for exploring uncertainty, and enables us to situate using video in workshops as a means to explore and sense process, as a mode of participation rather than a mode of registering what has happened. Chapter 4 discusses these experiences of using video in our Spaces of Innovation workshop.

In order to engage uncertainty for the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Author Biographies
• 1 Approaching Uncertainty
• 2 What is Uncertainty?
• 3 Uncertainty as Technology
• 4 Strategies for Disruption Yoko Akama, Sarah Pink, Dèbora Lanzeni, Elisenda Ardèvol, Katherine Moline, Ann Light and Shanti Sumartojo
• 5 Surrendering to and Tracing Uncertainty Tom Jackson, Yoko Akama, Sarah Pink and Shanti Sumartojo
• 6 Uncertainty as Technology for Moving Beyond David Carlin, Yoko Akama, Sarah Pink and Shanti Sumartojo
• 7 Propositions and Practical Applications
• References
• Index