Does Design Care...? (original) (raw)
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Caring Through Design: A Search for New Perspectives
Temes de Disseny
This issue of Temes de Disseny focuses on the contribution of design in promoting caring for life in all its manifestations and for the environment. In other words, caring for the entire planet. At a time when human health is in the spotlight more than ever, it is important to consider design within an interplay of different disciplines as societies worldwide strive to meet the Sustainable Development Goals while staying within the planetary boundaries. The aim of this issue is to bring a series of design and research perspectives to the forefront to plant the seed for new ideas about what might help designers become agents of change in the global health landscape.
Designing Cultures of Care Design as a Practice of Care 2 Design as a Practice of Care
Designing Cultures of Care, 2018
Design. Care. Designing. Care(ing). This mixture of nouns and verbs, of things and actions, of dispositions and propositions-in the singular and/or the collective, is the focus of this discussion. On first encounter it seems so simple or straightforward. We shall design with care. It is in or through care that we will design outcomes of meaning and connectivity. But as one explores more deeply, and considers each of the elements, alone and together, the complexity becomes apparent and you realize this combination of words is both an invitation and a declaration for how we might design, why we will design, and the value of this designing in the present and for the future. In this chapter, I will explore what care might offer for how we practice design. As many readers will know, over the past ten to fifteen years there has been a shift in how we understand and articulate design and its capacity to contribute to the world that we manifest or destroy. Through contemporary discourses and movements in sustainable design, human-centered design, participatory methods, codesign, and the possibilities of connectivity through digital technologies, definitions of design as a problem solving, materials-oriented suite of professions have been, and continue to be, challenged. With this some have argued that design is a socio-technical domain of practice (Kimbell 2015), which leads us in the right direction for expanding our thinking about design. Such critiques capture the links between social and cultural aspects of design, while retaining a focus on the material practices that are for the most part the basis for design practice. At the same time we have also seen the rise of design thinking as a particular articulation of design and its application to organizational or business contexts in particular.
Care as an integral process within the processes of design: A new model for Caring Design
Pending, 2020
If as Simon (1988) argues; a science of design needs to include a proper study of human beings; then the processes of design should also consider the process of Human Being. Heidegger's thesis (1962) named Care as the structure of Being 1. Taking this as a starting point, we have undertaken a wider exploration of the notion of Care and present our conclusions on what a universal structure of Human Being (Care) might look like. This prototype 'Model of Care' is a synthesis of knowledge in the form of four dimensions of Human Being. It gives structural form to the contentious notion of Care; one that enables the 'process of being human' (Care) to be better understood, communicated and included within the many processes of design.
Science and Engineering Ethics, 2023
This article introduces Designing for Care (D4C), a distinctive approach to project management and technological design informed by Care Ethics. We propose to conceptualize "care" as both the foundational value of D4C and as its guiding mid-level principle. As a value, care provides moral grounding. As a principle, it equips D4C with moral guidance to enact a caring process. The latter is made of a set of concrete, and often recursive, caring practices. One of the key assumption of D4C is a relational ontology of individual and group identities, which fosters the actualization of caring practices as essentially relational and (often) reciprocal. Moreover, D4C adopts the "ecological turn" in CE and stresses the ecological situatedness and impact of concrete projects, envisioning an extension of caring from intra-species to inter-species relations. We argue that care and caring can influence directly some of the phases and practices within the management of (energy) projects and the design of sociotechnical (energy) artefacts and systems. When issues related to "value change" emerge as problematic (e.g., values trade-offs, conflicts), the mid-level guiding principle of care helps evaluate and prioritize different values at stake within specific projects. Although there may be several actors and stakeholders involved in project management and technological design, here we will focus on the professionals in charge of imagining, designing, and carrying out these processes (i.e., project managers, designers, engineers). We suggest that adopting D4C would improve their ability to capture and assess stakeholders' values, critically reflect on and evaluate their own values, and judge which values prioritize. Although D4C may be adaptable to different fields and design contexts, we recommend its use especially within small and medium-scale (energy) projects. To show the benefits of adopting it, we envisage the application of D4C within the project management and the technological design of a community battery. The adoption of D4C can have multiple positive effects: transforming the mentality and practice of managing a project and designing technologies; enhancing caring relationships between managers, designers, and users as well as among users; achieving better communication, more inclusive participation, and more just decision-making. This is an initial attempt to articulate the structure and the procedural character of D4C. The application of D4C in a concrete project is needed to assess its actual impact, benefits, and limitations.
Who Cares? Proceedings of the 8th Biannual Nordic Design Research Society
Espoo, Finland: Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, 2019
Who cares ? This question is a provocation for design research. What do, or should, we care about in design and design research today? Underpinning the question are issues of culture and agency – who cares, for whom, and how? Taking care, or being cared for, evokes the choice of roles, and processes of interaction, co-creation and even decision-making. Caring, as a verb, emphasizes care as intention, action and labor in relation to others. Care can be understood as concern for that beyond oneself, for others and, thus, human, societal and even material and ecological rela- tions are at stake. The question of care is also a call for questioning relationships, participation and responsibility, democratic and sustainable ways of co-existing. From this expansive societal standpoint, we could even ask who cares about design? And what should we do about it? The 8th biennial NORDES conference poses the question, “who cares?”, exploring related questions, issues and propositions concerning responsibilities, relationships, ways of doing and directing design today.
How Can We Come to Care in and Through Design
2019
On a generic level, caring can be described as "everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible" (Fisher and Tronto, 1990). This paper asks how we as design researchers in Scandinavia come to care, for our world and more specifically for the local NORDES community. We do this by describing how we have maintained, continued and added (as a practice of repair) in relation to the most recent NORDES summer school (2018). The summer school invited students to work with tensions between despair, in a site marked and haunted (Tsing et al., 2017) by the aftermath of industrial design practices and hope, by making time for soil (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) in a community-supported agricultural scheme. The paper invites you to share some cruxes and insights that emerged, and to imagine teaching with care as a collective process that attempts to bring things together, not as oppositions, but as generative and p...
For many centuries philosophers have discussed the meaning and composition (dimensions) of Care – and certainly not only the attribution of meaning proposed by Martin Heidegger (1962) who gave it such prominence in Being and Time (1962). Since Hyginus produced his contentious myth or fable of Care or Cura (there is much disagreement around this point), philosophers have developed curious interpretations as well as employing different ways in which Care might be used to support a particular stance. And perhaps this is only right; it is a myth/fable after all and meant to be metaphoric. But considering the undisputed weight of the term Care, we might benefit from a little more consensus on what it is or means. And perhaps this could move us towards a more practical understanding of Care that would support constructed design activities that can be genuinely said to be Caring or at least have Care as their foundation. In this chapter we explore some but not all of the key formulations of Care that have helped to develop the rather unclear picture of Care that we have today. We will attempt to revisit that meaning which at least to some minds describes the essence of what it means to be human. We tease out these conceptualisations of Care in order to build a framework (Dimensions of Care) from which responses in the form of design actions might be (re)formulated. We offer this framework as a way in which we might look again at the responses proposed by design (actions) from another perspective-one that is shaped by Care as a central though ecologically scaled theme. This is Care not as simply utopian anticipation (Adams, 2009) but Care as playing a central role at ground zero in everyday human experience (Ziebland, 2012). The intention with this chapter is to reconsider and contribute to a foundational reconceptualisation of Care that is at the heart of what it means to be human and to do so with the intention of (in)forming an alternative framework for future design; one that is based on Care, centred in Care and fundamentally is Care.