Presentation by Liesbeth Huybrechts for the postgraduate program Multimedia & Communication: social en participatory use of new media.

1. MAD
• Phd Cultural
Studies/KULeuven
• Research coordinator
Social Spaces

2. 0. Social Design: question
Question for lot of
practitioners today
How to create for social
exchange in a local
community, museum,
library, with a design
product,... ?
Real life situations?

3. 1. Social Design, links to participatory
culture
“negotiated, oppositional, and deconstructive readings, configuration and
selection, and construction are all, in their own specific way, part of what I
call participatory media culture (Raessens)”
“hybrid constellation of information technology and large user numbers
interacting in a socio-technical ecosystem (Schäfer)”
(1) political level discourse that stimulates social progress.
(2) cultural critique demanding the reconfiguration of power relations.
(3) economic level participatory creation and things, amplified by information and
communication networks, enable broader, faster, and lower-cost co-ordination of activities.
(4) psychological and social levels value and power of participatory things, is related to the
level in which various actors were engaged in the creation process.
(5) specifications of technology on a technical-structural level, participatory media are
considered many-to-many media.

4. 2. Social Design: the components
Social design can be a support for many disciplines to create
social exchange.
Defining interactions between people, things, contexts

5. 2.1. Social Design: context
• Evolutions in new media and society (see other module)

6. 2.1. Social design: Things
• Thinking in concrete (collection of) things that can
mediate = exchange devices. A book, a chair, an art work,...
• Things always in process of change, ambiguous, never
agreed upon, ... Beyond classical chair, book, market
(independent on medium)

7. Chair
• Maartje Steenkamp
• Highchair

8. Book
• Unfortunates, Johnson
• Pages can be shuffled

9. Contexmapping
• Toys that mediate
understanding designers
and children with autism
(e.g. mirror/self-awareness,
buttons/explorative....)
• RichCollections
2008/2009, Helma van
Rijn
• http://www.helmavanrijn.n
l/Projects/richcollections-
2008-2009

10. Digital environment/tool
• Pachube
Pachube is a little like YouTube,
except that, rather than
sharing videos, Pachube
enables people to monitor
and share real time
environmental data from
sensors that are
connected to the internet

11. Things
• Can be endlessly
remixed
• open source and free
source: program's source
code available to a
distributed network of
people (Linus Torvalds)
• Pong: atari, breakout,
station, noisepong
(Bollansée and Standaert)

12. 2.2. Social Design: people
• Social design thinking engages all relevant people in a
process of creation for social exchange.
• Library owner, creative, end-user (library visitor), his/her
children,....

13. People
• Little boxes
• Groupware
(glocalisation)
• Networkware

14. Networkware and human autonomy
People's autonomy and possibilities for participation
increased. Benkler: it improves their capacity to do
more:
(1) for and by themselves;
(2) in loose commonality with others, without the
constrains of a price system or traditional hierarchical
models of social and economic organisation; and
(3) in formal organisations that operate outside the
market sphere.

15. Network associated with different types of
audiences/users
• Stakeholder
• Prosumer (Toffler) – professional consumer - mass
customisation (e.g. Bricks mass produced, services
around construction customised)
• Produser: producer – user (Axel Bruns) (e.g. Music
sharing sites)
• ProAm: professional amateur (Leadbeater and Miller)
(e.g. Sims, linux)

16. Inequality did not disappear
• Participation inequality in culture and online is not
radically changed
• 90 percent lurks, 9 percent contributes occasionally, 1
percent creates

17. 2.3. Social Design: relation
Social design wants to reconfigure
relations people -things - contexts.
Goal?
formal (design process)
Informal (online, in the library,...)
implicit participation, without being very
conscious (e.g. clicking a flickr picture and
in that way changing its position)
explicit relation people-environment
e.g. social field, engaging people in
community.

18. Informal participation (explicit and implicit)

19. Formal participation (design methods)

20. 3. Formal social design: Two visions
• Critical theory, design, art.... : friction
• Community theory, design, art,...: collaboration

21. 3.1. Critical vision: friction
• The Gods Must be crazy: Coke bottle (8.41)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66pTPWg_wUw
• Friction set language games into play

22. Counterculture gave birth to many
innovations
Steward Brand, 1965 Whole
Earth Catalogue
It granted access to tools for a
person to "find his own
inspiration, shape his own
environment, and share
his adventure with
whoever is interested
• The Well (since 1985)
• You own Your Own
Words

23. Paradox: Marketing & friction
• Apple: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8
• IBM: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LR1Xvvch18

24. Today, Manifesto of Open Disruption and
Participation
Eric Paulos statements about ubiquitous computing and
design: “Ubiquitous technology is with us and is indeed
allowing us to communicate, buy, sell, connect, and do
miraculous things. However, it is time for this technology to
empower us to go beyond finding friends, chatting with
colleagues, locating hip bars, and buying music”.
“We want our tools to sing of not just productivity but of our
love of curiosity, the joy of wonderment, and the freshness
of the unknown”.

25. Today, antagonistic linkage
Ippolita, Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter: Web2.0. celebrated as
most important triggers for participation, do not produce the
friction early participatory culture or subcultures, reproduce old
opinions and cultural patterns
to have truly participatory and revolutionary potential, tools
should use technique of antagonistic linkage
transform tools into things that enable “the plurality of
expression of networked life”

26. Expect/allow appropriation of your
thing/product/...
• Koulamata, Machinama
• Hacked game engine to
tell story about Paris
riots

27. Integration appropriation in professional
process
• Haier
• Sweet potatoes

28. Critical Design
• Reaction against user
centred design (people
can test
products/services we
make)
• Critical things make us
think/participate
• Social Mobiles, Ideo

29. Vision
• “From our expert view point we can create systems that
disrupt the status quo, allow people to participate in a
better, different,... way” (cultural)

30. 3.2. Community visions: collaboration
• Two ingredients
(1) the collaborative production of things,
(2) the recognition of the individual contribution in this
collaborative process.

31. Collaborative production
In a process of collaborative engagement, people collaborate in each
other's content to extend or improve it.: aided by environments that
provide or point to tools or structures that pre-configure collaboration, like
Wikipedia.
Can be supported by formal classes and courses, rehearsals, training
sessions and informal mentor-ship: most experienced can pass on
knowledge and practices to the less experienced.
Can be developed in an iterative, evolutionary way: evolution of things
could be made traceable in remixes or via archives, through various
stages and a multi-layered document (e.g.: Pachube discloses online
which participatory adaptations were made to their application).
Participatory work must be experienced as common property wherein
people can discover individual merit.

32. Peer recognition
Room for user-led content production
Heterarchical community structures (very open and structured at the
same time, like open source environments): low barriers to artistic
expression and civic engagement, with - on the other side - strong
support for producing and sharing creations.
Alternative approaches to intellectual property (e.g. open source or creative
commons).
Participatory work has to be rewarded via the representation of members’
views to the wider community and society at large.
Forms of peer recognition through events, displays and performances that
allow people to believe that their (potential) contributions are valued

33. Participatory Design
• Users, other disciplines are partners in creation process
• Originates in collective design
• Trade unions 1970s: computer technologies in
workplace, designing systems that empower all parties:
workers, employers, machines
• 1981, in North America, the Computer Professionals for
Social Responsibility (CPSR)

34. Variants
Community architecture (Turner, Habraken,
Alexander,...)
Universal Design: ‘Design for All’ has two
goals: 1. creating environments, artefacts
and experiences that are functional and
pleasurable for everybody, including
people with disabilities, 2. the rejection of
the division of people into able and
disabled people, to avoid stigma. “Focus
on ‘handicap situations’ instead of
‘handicapped people’ ”
Inclusive design (disabilities reader)
Co-design

35. Community Art
• Made by OYA
• Textile workshops in
favelas Brazil

36. Vision
• 1. people have the right to participate (politics)
• 2. systems are better when you allow people to
participate in the process (technical)

37. 3.3. Design participation
• More hybrid model
• Combines benefits of
friction and social
connection
• 1. political, 2. technical,
3. cultural domains
combined

38. Documentary
• Stavager, Jeanne Van
Heeswijk
• It runs in the
neighbourhood

39. DIY video
• The Patching Zone
• Digital Dreams Festival

40. Pass through video
• World Wide Westwijk
• Peter Westenberg

41. Participatory platform
• Cool media, Hot talk
show

42. Participatory setting
• Talkaoke
• http://www.youtube.com
/view_play_list?
p=61AC3C7F98E4A235

43. Hybrid model of remixing
• All (not expert or user)
perspectives, designers,
users, other discplines
work together in
'tactical' ways
• Over time, in
sustainable ways
• Remixing 'templates'

44. templates
Habraken proposed to split the built
environment in two spheres: support
structure reflects the communal realm
of decision making, which is the
constant element in a ongoing process
of change.
’Detachable units’, or ‘Housing assembly
kits’ he gave explicit room to the
individual.
Frans van der Werf, Molenvliet,
Rotterdam, 1974

45. templates
• Isadora
• Real-time manipulation
of video

46. Professional implementation of remixing
• Bricophone
• Mobile phone infrastructure, set up network of about
10.000 people
• Wireless sensor network technology out of industrial
technology
• In any place: far away, festivals

47. GRL
• GRL: “It is a low-cost eye-tracking
apparatus & custom software that
allows graffiti writers and artists
with paralysis resulting from
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to
draw using only their eyes”

48. Design Participation
• Expert/critical matches the
social
• Disciplines create risky
things encouraging tactical
behaviour by other
perspectives
• Tactical behaviour during
process has predictive value
for tactical behaviour after
process is over

49. Risky things
• Used in formal/informal creation processes
• open/friction

50. Risky things
• LilyPad Arduino (practices)
entering new communities as
strange element and coming out
in new forms, re-assemblies, old
and new, digital and physical
• documentation!!!

51. Risky things
Every thing has potential to become
risky

52. Risky things: people are agent
Routes and Routines
(Constant vzw)

53. Risky things: relate to context
Patching Zone. Go-for-iT!
• Creating hybrid objects
between
– observations youth
culture
– low tech
prototypes, Tic-tac-
toe: folk game
• Image Patching Zone

54. Risky thing: relation of remix is possible
Unfold.
Ontwerpbox
l'Artisan Electronique

55. Risky thing: time = most difficult
Patching Zone. Go-for-iT!
• final installation: hybrid
site specific and larger
folk culture
• Time problematics of
sustainability of outputs
of social design
Image Patching Zone

56. Conclusion: Social Design
• Things are drivers of formal and informal participatory creation
processes
• Always prototypes (>< end-products) creating
– Vision 1: friction
– Vision 2: open/collaboration
– Vision 3: remix into time
• Social design proposes different approach in art education, creative
professions and policy: cross-overs users, artists, engineers,
architects, sociologists, relate in tactical ways and co-construct things
+ hand over control from time to time and know how to hand over

57. Contact
liesbeth.huybrechts@mda.khlim.be
www.socialspaces.be
www.e-cultuur.be
http://twitter.com/liesbit