Context
Empathy
Object agency
Workshops
Litterature
The emotional metaphor
Social meaning-making
Qualitative inquiry
The attitudinal designer
Publication
References (Coming soon!)
Empathy
In the Oxford Dictionary app on my Mac, I typed in “empathy” and was instantly provided with the following description:
I believe most of us consider ourselves emphatic beings and typically think of sociopaths in the lack thereof. Pondering over the concept, I wondered when I last had a encountered a moment of empathy with a stranger. It can easily be confused with similar notions such as friendliness, sympathy, happiness and more. While I will not set out to distinguish them or to form one truth, I suggest the thought for you to have a think about.
In my search for a clear empathic moment, one was hard to pick out. Was it, for example, when I saw someone run for the tram, only just to miss it – and feeling that? Or observing a mother with a newborn on her arm, endlessly yawning at the local cafe – and feeling her? I guess, and hope, that we all experience empathy in a number of ways, in small moments and larger. At the same time, often it seems the feeling is most obvious in situations of “enlarged” emotional moments – and maybe less so in the invisibles of monotonous, everyday life. Aditionally, these examples were one-sided and lacked the opportunity for interconnection.
German writer Daniel Kehlmann, in an interview with Marc-Christoph Wagner, address how we tend to operate in thinking groups. While his few examples are binary opposites; in/outs, minorities/majorities, refugees/citizens – I don’t believe our groups necessarily have to be or occur in such a rigid form. We could also think of a softer version and not necessarily an us/them setup but rather one of identification. However, I enjoy his notion of thinking groups, and it is here I wonder if the object can interfere and shape a different encounter. One which perhaps pushes participants outside of their zone of comfort, help them reveal themselves or aid in forming new understandings and meaning together.
Object agency
Objects can take many shapes and go by many names. Thing. Artefact. Article. Item. Piece. They are all around us. Often we got too many, seldom too few.
Inherent in a object-based enquiry exists a conundrum of objects as symbol of mass-consumption and consumerism, while also posing the option for objects as being meaningful. While both can be true, this project adapts a more positive note of objects as important and meaningful in our understanding of the world.
The things with which we live are not only a medium through which to think the world, but also form an integral part of living and acting and doing in that world. From a consistently Marxist and materialist perspective, things are part and parcel of society, culture, politics and values, and constitute a key medium through which we can understand and analyse social identity, change and transformation. (Tilley 2011, p.350)
Workshops
The workshops always consist of two participants who each bring an object based on a given task, e.g. ‘bring an object you considered yourself lucky to find’. The workshops go for 20 minutes to an hour depending on the encounter. Participants receive only their task and a few suggestions for means of documentation. After the workshop, we sit down for a debrief.
The workshops set out to explore the individual’s world – emphasising real-world examples and lived experiences. A phenomenological stance means that the collection of data is relatively unstructured, to allow for interpretations by participants. We are open for wonder and mystery . It is not a search for an absolute truth; it’s about the subjective accounts of the participants and the encounter.
The emotional metaphor
Objects can take many shapes and go under many names. Thing. Artefact. Article. Item. Piece. Device. In Bruno Latour’s From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik Or How to Make Things Public he states: ‘For too long, objects have been wrongly portrayed as matter-of-fact. This is unfair to them, unfair to science, unfair to objectivity, unfair to experience.’ . Alfred Gell likewise argues that objects take effect not exclusively by communicating conventionally understood messages but suggests a ‘grey area where semiotics inference merges with hypothetical inferences of a non-semiotic kind’ . Gell phrases this notion abductions – ‘neither ‘semiotic conventions’ or ‘laws of nature’ but something in between’ . As such, one may contend objects as commonly understood, neither as systems or semiotics but rather open up for the non-iconic discourse that a chair is more than a device with which to sit.
Lusebrink seems to similarly address Gell’s ‘grey area’ where objects exist as tools for meaning-making. Lusebrink speaks of visual symbols and metaphors’s ability to give meaning and form to language, feelings or energy in the subconscious; as a mediator between ‘the body and psyche’ , concurring with the notion that richness of emotion is often conceptualised and understood using metaphors and metonymies , and to help build a system of thinking and concepts that can guide in confusion and aid in making ‘something unfamiliar familiar’ . Christopher Tilley likewise suggests the metaphor as central to both material culture and language as a means of linkage ‘between seemingly disparate social and material domains’ .
One may argue that visual objects can extend beyond their design intent and physicality, and give meaning and form to language, concurring with Tilley on the non-verbal materiality of objects, and how “material forms complement what can be communicated in language” .
.In her book Evocative Objects , Sherry Turkle asked a number of contributors (designers, artists, scientists) to ‘trace the power of objects in their lives, objects that connect them to ideas and to people’ . She too found objects as tools to think with, to generate new ideas, and as ‘companions to our emotional lives’ .
Social meaning-making
Lusebrink , Abbott & Forceville , Salgado-Montejo et al. and Sauter all emphasise the opportunity of the multimodal symbol. Lusebrink in more detail addresses how a visual symbol can become a point of action, and, as an object, give ‘sensory configuration to emergent ideas and feelings’ . Amongst others, Tilley , Turkle Gross , Miller additionally suggests things as meaningful in both social analysis and our understanding of self.
The things with which we live are not only a medium through which to think the world, but also form an integral part of living and acting and doing in that world. From a consistently Marxist and materialist perspective, things are part and parcel of society, culture, politics and values, and constitute a key medium through which we can understand and analyse social identity, change and transformation. (Tilley 2011, p.350)
This notion of things as tools for various understandings establishes the object’s ability to hold and convey layered, ambitious and contradictory meanings. However, objectification, Tilley and Miller argues, attempts to break the idea of material things as tools, in a subject/object relationship, and instead suggests a more fluid and intersectional interpretation: ‘we touch the things and the things simultaneously touch us’ or; ‘the thing is the person, and the person is the thing’ . Gell also refers to this idea as distributed personhood in the sense that our objects become components of our identities.
Additionally, Gell argues for the position that social agency can be exercised not only relative to things but also by things . As picked up by Tilley; ‘objects circulate through people’s activities and can contextually produce new types of activities, objects and events’ . Humphries and Smith also approach objects as agents; ‘objects are more than passive backdrops to narrative action’ . By the example of a keyboard, they argue how it plays an active role in typing speed, distribution of messages and reproduction of communication.
Qualitative inquiry
Brinkmann speaks of qualitative research within the context of every life, and the opportunity to craft small, local narratives for new meaning. On a similar note, Tilley and Cameron-Daum disregard the everyday as ‘trivial’ and propose that what really matters, ‘depth’, is ‘everywhere around us’ .
Approaching qualitative inquiry from perspectives and theory of phenomenology require the research to ‘bracket’ preconceptions and understandings and ‘to the best of our ability to allow phenomena to ‘speak for themselves’’, to ‘understand human life ‘from the inside’’ in order to emphasise lived experiences.
Qualitative research is reliant on strategy and reflections informed by theory, and for the purpose of this research, two stances proposed by Brinkmann appear significant. Firstly, as briefly introduced, is the ‘phenomenological stance: making the obvious obvious’ – seeing the world for what it is. Tilley and Cameron-Daum similarly state how ‘the project of analysis becomes the recognition and the bringing forth to consciousness of the extraordinary character of the ordinary’ . Through close portrayal along with precise and direct description from observations, one can present ‘data’ as relevant and exciting as to suggest the shaping of a phenomenon, and contextualise it with relevant theoretical and societal concepts .
Brinkmann’s second stance points to ‘making the obvious dubious’ - the ‘deconstructive stance’ – relying on a process of ‘deconstruction’ . First, we destruct a perception, text or understanding in order to open up for construction of other(s). The goal is to show meanings and understandings as unstable and endlessly ambiguous. The reasoning is abductive, allowing for wonder rather than a search of an absolute truth .
With his 100 chairs in 100 days project, Martino Gamper set out to make chairs from bits of old destructed chairs. His process seems reminiscent of Brinkmann’s deconstructive stance as a tool to present new possibilities. Moreover, Gamper states ‘there is no perfect design and there is no über-design’ , similarly allowing for the incidental and unusual rather than an absolute truth. In like manner, Hotel Hotel’s project Object Therapy was also a qualitative inquiry shaped around deconstruction. From broken artefacts provided by locals, a number of artists were asked to mend or transform the objects as they saw fit. The project examined the meaning of the object and design as a process for transformation.
The attitudinal designer
The concept of design as a tool for change is not new. In his book Vision in Motion published in 1947, Bauhaus professor Moholy-Nagy wrote: ‘ultimately all problems of design merge into one great problem: ‘design for life’’ . He spoke of designs as a valid attitude to view projects in context with community that allows for resourceful and inventive processes. Likewise, Katherine McCoy, in her talk Good Citizenship , proposed the idea of designers as social and political agents who ought to use our particular talents and skills to help shape our world and reconnect with our cultural milieu with an introduction of cultural and social work.
In her book Design as an Attitude Alice Rawsthorn picks up on the concepts from Moholy-Nagy, and builds on his ideas of design as a powerful social and political force by ‘acting as an efficient and ingenious agent of change’ and highlights a ‘transformation of design into the fluid, open-ended medium’ by, amongst other factors, working collaboratively in a transdisciplinary set-up allowing areas such as science, anthropology, philosophy and social science to inform their work. Rawsthorn additionally addresses the opportunity for alternative responses which matches Paul Marcus Fuog’s notion of designing for opportunities rather than problems . If we design for set problems, we may not see the opportunities right in front of us. Both Fuog and Rawsthorn mention this as a necessity, especially when dealing with issues of growing complexity. Similar concepts appear in Courageous Citizens - How Culture Contributes to Social Change where editors Bas Lafleur, Wietske Maas and Susanne Mors mention the opportunity to challenge fixed ideas and contribute inspiration, open up debate and renegotiations – especially amid complex societal reconfigurations .
This need to look beyond ‘the problem’ echoes with methodologies of phenomenological research and human-centered design, particularly in awareness of one’s own bias and the need to ‘lay aside our prevailing understanding of phenomena and revisit our immediate experience of them in order that new meanings may emerge’ . This idea of unprescribed enquiries (well-knowing that such is never truly possible) allows designers to engage in a holistic and polemical approach, where the enquiry is less isolated from its context and the process open for involving ‘the subjects’ and not only the idea of them.
Publication
As a means of documentation, this is issue 1 of 'Objects as Social Agents', November 2018.
