Always trying to articulate what we mean
Orbiting: growing to and growing away from meaning
It seems it will always be an act of trying to explain what we mean.
This is another one of those attempts.
Perhaps, after the last publication, this is a means of explaining our situatedness, as it requires a very specific career trajectory or selection of reading materials to understand what we are after and why we continue to go on about it. Unlike other authors, we’re not leaving the understanding of our work’s purpose and impact up to chance.
There is a tedium. A constant negotiation.
Saying too much—destroys abstraction and, in turn, destroys meaning. People exceed our definitions, our qualifiers. At times, work feels antithetical to theory, especially when it requires things and people to be intelligible. Intelligibility and articulability are difficult to untangle. Writing with clarity, and using common shared terms evokes traditions and, for better or worse, their reputations. Reputations come with judgment, without consideration for a theory’s contribution.
Saying too little—risks not moving the needle, making it too complicated to understand. There is no singular comprehensive theory for our work, no “perfect words” to fully articulate our vision.
So, we’re trying to create some.
As with most projects, this is reactionary. While our history shows that being reactionary is largely inescapable, it is a vantage point that is disparaged, perhaps rightly so, and condemned to the status of a “weaker form of creation”—one that often devolves into extremism. Extremism runs counter to our project and distances us from the work of researching and designing for good—work which seems to imply some excavating of the self, to various degrees, to fill yourself with the ambitions of others. While we can’t free ourselves of our biases entirely, we can stifle our own aspirations for the collective good. (After all, it’s not about us.) Subjects will likely sacrifice some of their desires for their communities, the interplay and renegotiation that happens in good design. This work is not a pendulum swing to the other side, not dialectical, not an appeal to a clean binary that comes with the territory of reactionary work. This work, while born out of emotion and need, is an attempt to settle into a true neutral; it is an attempt at a proposal and articulation of a middle ground.
We were upset by tradition. Our project broadly defines experts because we recognize there are different ways of knowing—non-traditional, non-hegemonic ways of knowing that haven’t historically been recognized. We want to bring them in and see how they may shape our work.
The leap from zero to one feels larger than one to two. As we build up and bring in these voices, many of the experts we have worked with have been academics. While academia often feels neatly contained to the confines of ivory institutions, a growing subset of academics are driven to break out and address societal challenges found alongside their work, through the development of products, services, or systems. While well-positioned with this motivation for good, resources (at least historically), and deep subject matter expertise, they are not market experts. Their expertise does not extend to validating these solutions.
We were upset by the tension between intention and impact, recognizing that those best positioned to do good often lack the necessary tools. The closest word for what we do is “market validation,” but we feel it goes beyond this. We refine expert-led solutions for the public good through collaboration with affected communities. It’s not for the bottom line but for the public interest.
The publication portion of our work focuses on tackling a different challenge; we were upset by existing research and design frameworks. Even after we engaged experts in the research and design process, industry frameworks had glaring limitations and shortcomings. As we see it, research and design frameworks are one the most viable ways of affecting change, but we are also cognizant of the old and outdated assumptions that power industry processes—simplifications that kill complexity to increase efficiency.
It’s a call to start anew, while not from scratch. While academia feels increasingly like the old guard, we see value in particular disciplines that seek to push paradigms forward. Free from the confines of capitalism, academics can theorize. It’s freeing but not grounded; academics are granted the time to do meta-cognitive work that industry professionals are not. While this may increasingly become a thing of the past with the new American administration, we aren’t indifferent to the bottom line; of course, we understand its necessity. We seek to move beyond purely monetary goals, supplement activist work, and offer ways to rebuild from re-tooled [better] frameworks. We want to amend and update how we do research and design, so we can move forward.
We acknowledge that we cannot escape the confines of capitalism, on an individual level—the need to feed our children, the compromise for subsistence. We want to offer incremental ways the researcher can take control despite the circumstances. These publications are also for them; it’s about capitalizing on a researcher and designer’s quiet power.
So, our work is two-fold:
Offering research and design consultancy (user research, market research, and service design activities) for expert-developed products and services. In short, we offer a form of “market validation.” This is the closest term for what we hope to achieve, but unlike market validation which seeks to further business priorities, we want to do good. (It may be something closer to “community validation.”)
Co-creating generalizable, scalable design frameworks for the general public. Updating outdated research and design frameworks to better reflect and cater to the public good. Offering “built-in” theories to build anew, and in turn, allowing researchers to seize power where they can.
We care about building products, services, and systems that advance the public interest. We want to create in ways that are more representative. We see this as only possible through connecting with affected and diverse groups of people (research) and building from this research (design).
As we try to articulate our piece, we understand how vital you are to these tasks. This work takes you. Your insight is valuable—your thoughts can set our work down a completely different path. It’s about learning and building together to advance the public interest.
We invite you to share your insights and further develop these ideas, especially to meet your contextual needs; we value multiplicities, context, and nuance. Your feedback is a valuable part of this project, and we are excited to collaborate with you.
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