CoDesign

International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts

ISSN: 1571-0882 (Print) 1745-3755 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ncdn20

Designing things together: intersections of co-

design and actor–network theory

Cristiano Storni, Thomas Binder, Per Linde & Dagny Stuedahl

To cite this article: Cristiano Storni, Thomas Binder, Per Linde & Dagny Stuedahl (2015)
Designing things together: intersections of co-design and actor–network theory, CoDesign,
11:3-4, 149-151, DOI: 10.1080/15710882.2015.1081442

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2015.1081442

Published online: 29 Oct 2015.

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 CoDesign, 2015
Vol. 11, Nos. 3–4, 149–151, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2015.1081442

EDITORIAL
Designing things together: intersections of co-design and
actor –network theory

This special issue brings together nine papers that explore in different ways the interesting
space at the intersection of co-design and actor –network theory.1 The papers consolidate a
tradition of multidisciplinary design research with contributions from science and
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technology studies (STS) in which design is seen as a social and political activity playing a
vital role in the shaping of our societies. Design is becoming less confined to the design
studio with well-identified stakeholders. It takes new forms as public interventions and as
explorations ‘in the wild’. This means that it becomes more difficult to understand the
scope and limits of design interventions and, therefore design research needs new tools to
address and reflect these changes. Similarly, actor-network theory (ANT) has moved out
of its traditional concern with STS that is critical of modernist separations (such as object/
subject and nature/culture), to a concern with reassembling the social and building a
common world, where democratic, ecological and political issues permeate everyday life,
and design and technology are an integral part of it.
Designing things together has become for us as editors, a label to identify this overlap
between co-design and ANT and to support a shared agenda towards technical democracy
that helps us to further ‘unpack’ the co- in co-design. The papers in this issue look at a
series of intersecting topics and, even if they approach and use ANT in different ways, they
all contribute to a more systematic exploration of how to design things together. The
authors are concerned with the relationship between design and democracy (Binder et al.,
Storni), participation (Palmas and Von Busch; Andersen et al.), making things public
(Schoffelen et al.; Stuedahl and Smørdal), new collective forms of design experiments
(Tironi and Laurent; Lindstrom and Stahl), and new ways to look at and talk about co-
design (Akama).
The papers reaffirm a non-modern way of thinking about co-design that is critical of
the idea of the designer as a hero (or user as a king), the idea of participation being
unproblematic or taken for granted, the clear-cut opposition between design and use
(designer and user, design and research), the idea of design objects as stand-alone
outcomes, or that of collaborating entities pre-existing the design process.
This special issue opens with two research papers that view ANT as a means of
rethinking collaborative design practices towards a design democracy. Binder et al discuss
how ANT can reinvigorate participatory design as democratic design experiments
between parliament and laboratory. Critical of the obsession with objects dominant in
design and of human-centeredness, the authors articulate the idea of designing ‘things’ as
socio-material assemblies of public concerns and issues that evolve over time. Addressing
Latour’s call for co-habitation, Storni proposes a translation of ANT from an STS tool to
produce risky accounts, to a design tool to design things together. In this translation, Storni
proposes three turns for design: ontological, methodological and epistemological. The first
argues for the design of actor networks. The second suggests designing by means of actor
networking in public, and thus calls for a much-needed cartography of co-design. The third
suggests moving from the idea of the designer as the prince of a network to the designer as

q 2015 Taylor & Francis

 150
2 Editorial

an agnostic Prometheus. Drawing on the mapping controversies programme, Schoffelen

et al explore how visualizations in co-design can facilitate participation. Acknowledging
the need to make the design process more visible and public, the authors focus on how
such visualizations can be both transparent and readable. Through a series of case studies,
the authors discuss three aspects of such visualizations: how they make the process more
engaging, how they support sense-making and how they facilitate reflection. In their
studies, they contribute to a better understanding of design that address ANT’s call for
making things public. With similar concerns and drawing on the classic ANT notion of
translation, Stuedahl and Smørdal discuss a design case where the authors and museum
staff explore new ways of making a museum and its artefacts more public through social
media. They stress the importance of developing experimental zones where design is about
learning and developing over time. In this way, they offer a view of co-design as a matter
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of developing (together) and show how making things public is about transforming matters
of concern within experimental zones. Different forms of design experiments are also the
main focus of the two following research papers by Tironi and Laurent, and Lindstrom and
Stahl, although with two rather different case studies. Tironi and Laurent discuss a case of
what they call an experimental mode of industrial innovation. More than 30 years after
Callon’s work on the electric engine, the authors report on the Twizy Way, an initiative
exploring a new electric car-sharing system by Renault that turned a small French town
into a test and demonstration laboratory. They show how the Twizy Way was indeed co-
designed but not according to Renault’s original design as several unexpected participants
became co-experimenters. In this way, they challenge traditional separations (public and
private sector, inside and outside of a company, designer and user) and show the
uncontrolled nature of such large experiments. Lindstrom and Stahl offer a discussion of a
completely different design experiment. After reviewing and critically discussing several
STS figurations and their politics, the authors discuss the ANT-inspired figuration of
patch-working. They do so by drawing on the travelling exhibition Threads – a Mobile
Sewing Circle in which participants are invited to embroider text messages by hand or with
a sewing machine. By stressing the performative nature of patchworking, they stress that
co-design is about gatherings and issues (both plural) and propose a design approach to
accommodate participation in open-ended processes. The notion of participation is the
focus in the two papers that follow. Both offer a critique of the more traditional notion of
participation that takes it for granted, or uncritically links it with democracy. Palmas and
Von Busch draw on a post-political approach to show how participation is often used to
legitimize the power and political agendas of elites. In discussing an urban planning case
study, they argue that ANT might be used as a powerful tool to make explicit the
democratic deficiencies of co-design practices. They show how the interests of
participants may be betrayed, not simply as a result of some participants having stronger
voices, but as a result of material modes of participation, what they label quasi-quisling.
Andersen et al also focus on the notion of participation and offer what they call a realistic
view of participation. From an ANT perspective, they see participation as a matter of
concern as it can be ‘overtaken’ by numerous and often unexpected actors in participatory
processes. They base their argument on their experience of a project concerned with the
development of a tele-dialogue system for social workers. During the project, they used
ANT to ‘unpack’ participants as networks of heterogeneous material, and in the process
they highlight three key challenges for PD: participants become network configurations,
participation partially exists in all elements of a project and, third, there is no gold standard
for participation.
 Editorial 151
3

This special issue concludes with a contribution from Akama. Applying the Japanese
philosophy of Ma, she focuses on the in-between-ness of co-design. Linking Ma with
Latour’s plasma, she brings our attention to the empty spaces of a network, the unsaid,
unseen, not yet formatted and liminal. In doing so, she offers an interesting view of co-
design, but also experiments with a style of writing sensitive to Ma that addresses Latour’s
call to develop a style of writing achieving realism ‘on matters of concern’.
Before leaving the reader to peruse this special issue, we would like to thank the many
who have made this possible. First of all, our thanks to the long list of reviewers who have
made this experience extremely rewarding for all of us and who have made this editorial
work possible: Carl DiSalvo, Casper Bruun Jensen, Christian Dindler, Christina Mörtberg,
Christopher LeDantec, Connie Svabo, Eric Monteiro, Giorgio De Michelis, Ignacio
Farias, Judith Gregory, Lars Bo Andersen, Lone Malmborg, Mette Agger Eriksen, Mike
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Michael, Monica Buscher, Neah Kumar, Noortje Marres, Ole Smørdal, Pelle Ehn, Peter
Danhold, Peter Lauritsen, Pirjo Elovaara, Sisse Finken, Sissel Olander, Tommaso
Venturini. We would also like to thank the chief editor of the co-design journal, Janet
McDonnell, who from our very first contact in 2012 has always been supportive and
extremely helpful throughout the process.

Note
1. In response to our original call (www.tandf.co.uk/journals/cfp/ncdncfp.pdf) acknowledging an
interesting space at the intersection of co-deign and actor – network theory, we received
68 expressions of interest. Expressions of interest came from very disparate areas: design
schools, fine arts, architecture and urban studies, communication and media, computer science,
public policy, pedagogy, philosophy, medicine and health, information and business schools.
Contributions came from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, Denmark, France,
Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland,
Turkey, the UK and the USA. We invited 23 authors to submit full papers and we received 16
papers. After two rounds of three reviews, nine works came through the process and are
presented here.

Cristiano Storni
University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

Thomas Binder
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design, Copenhagen, Denmark

Per Linde
Malmö University, Malmö , Sweden

Dagny Stuedahl
Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Oslo, Norway