Should the Culture of Participation inform a new Ethics of Design?

Abstract

This paper aims to re ect on the role of Culture of Participation in fostering an Ethics of Design, as a means of true innovation in contemporary society. Participation often stands on commonalities, empathy and the desire to share our own beliefs and world views. The design of artifacts has as its rst, though implicit purpose, to convey a message. Our economy relies even more on knowledge-intensive practices and tools, as a powerful lens of analysing problems and nding solutions. Being aware of the message that a powerful knowledge technology may convey o ers a unprecedented instrument to improve ours and others lives, when wisely and ethically understood. Starting from a critical consideration of the \comfortable numbness" in mainstream IT design, we would like to suggest how inescapable re ections rooting in STS and in semiotic engineering may help discuss culture of participation from the alternative perspective of the \power" of design.

Keywords

• Culture of Participation
• Ethics of Design
• Knowledge Technology
• Gender Studies

Motivations and Background

The expression \ethics of design" refers to a set of \norms [...] that should be adhered to in the designing process and the qualities that should be present in the resulting design" [ 5 ](p. 306). We intend this expression in a quite provocatively way to highlight the need to make the IT designers' intentions more explicit (i.e., their purpose), as a way to question if design is exerted from an ethical standpoint, or at least if designers are totally aware and responsible for the consequences of the machines they produce. We also speak of an \ethics of design" in the context of a discourse addressing whether the achievement and sustainability of a Culture of Participation [ 16 ] in design is really feasible, and whether it should be one licit, and also legitimate (according to the norms mentioned above) purpose of the introduction of Information Technologies (ITs) into human communities.

Historically, machine-centered (automated) information technologies have been introduced (and found pervasive di usion), to allow the modern state bureaucracies to better control their material and economic ows, and to allow the consumerist market derived from the heavy industrialization of the 19th century to move goods and people faster and safer. Little wonder then, that ITs are considered a technology of control [ 6 ], on which \scripts" of action and interaction are inscribed and a orded [ 2 ]. However, ITs deal mainly with (linguistic) representations [ 7 ]. In virtue of the symbolic power of representations to move people towards some interpretations, and therefore actions (or non actions), designing a technology can also be seen as an \action at a distance" device, or a device to exert a \symbolic power" (or violence) [ 24 ] on its users, a power that many Science, Technology and Society (STS) scholars acknowledge as deeply gendered [ 13 ].

This capability is possible only if the designer (the inscriber) con-vinces (sic) the interpreter (the user) through the machine, which is just part of the worldchanging project of the designer [ 34 ]: the machine is then a sort of semiotic device [ 30 ] through which who predicts (and longs for controlling) the \future" communicates with who is called to grant those predictions. This argument has some mind-boggling consequences whose discussion would be out of the scope of this position paper: here we just hint at the fact that from the new standpoint the so called \requirements" of an IT would be seen more as what the system requires the users to comply with, than what the users expressed as their fully appropriated \needs"1. To acknowledge this lie of the land is one step towards the di usion of a new ethics of the design towards the ideal of the \conviviality" [ 20 ], i.e., supporting sociality, exchange, communication, interactions within human communities; rather than towards the ethics of the \(never-ending) want and desire", which seems to be one of the most frequently recurring unintended consequences of IT adoption [ 19 ].

What does a conviviality-oriented ethics of design entail? The point here is that real communication can only be bidirectional: it is intrinsically participatory in that it is a \putting in common", and also from the etymological point of view it cannot be divided by an \exchange". Thus, while an \ethics of the need" [ 21 ] propagates from designers to users (\I tell you that you need this; and I need you to perform that task through my machine"), an ethics of conviviality and participation calls for new categories in which to conceive the development of IT artifacts.

These premises have been already expressed in the IS research, or at least they are periodically renovated (e.g., [ 1 ])). Nevertheless, we believe that they are worthy to be recalled nowadays that ITs can enable new { and more powerful, more conscious { forms of participation: we are not speaking of the surrogate of participation that current social networking sites so well exhibit nowadays (as cover of their surreptitious aim to improve product circulation and consumption); but rather of the participation that collaborative produsage-oriented [ 8 ] Open1 Interestingly, the English word `requirement' subsumes both the meanings of `that which is required' and `need'. Proc. of Second International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2014 Como (Italy), May 27th, 2014 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).

Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.

source Web-based platforms can enable, especially if left (at least partially) in control of the crowd, and free to evolve according to the needs and wishes of the majority and thanks to the competencies and e orts of the voluntary.

These new technologies have the power to overturn the idea that IT is scriptinscribed [ 2 ], and imposed to users by the designers (and by those supporting their work, like the contractors), i.e., the masculine idea that conceives technology as a tool for highhandedness and control, at a potentially worldwide scale; and to introduce a di erent idea: the idea that IT is a tool for communication and conversation [ 14 ], to improve participation of individuals within communities (which are way smaller than the \global village"), mutual and reciprocal inter-est (i.e., being-between), and ultimately, \care", i.e., the feminine idea of caring for the things and the people because these tell your stories, and give you (possibly only by re ection) your sense of identity, and reason to live for [ 10 ]. 2

In the age of the smart design

Scholars in the eld of STSs, and feminist studies in particular, made an e ort to outline how technology and technologization of knowledge are not neutral phenomena that give equal chance to concordance and dissent [ 36 ], [ 18 ], [ 4 ], [ 35 ]. Some of these scholars, among which Lucy Suchman, push at the extreme the concept of design order [ 24 ], where Western culture is seen as prevailing, at the expenses of a critical vision of what is hidden: the invisible work of \others", alternative cultures and sciences, and the taken for granted worldview often subsuming an uncritical acceptance of the \privileged (auto)-reference" [ 32 ], [ 33 ], [ 27 ]. Some philosophers highlighted the necessity of an ethics of information [ 17 ] as a commitment to preserve the good intentions of technology mediated actions (if any), without avoiding personal responsibility. Put it in other words, the design of artifacts has as its rst, though implicit purpose, to convey a message [ 30 ]. And, as the most in uential studies of communication predicted since the beginning, the message can be everything (or everything involved in communication can be the message) [ 26 ].

Investigations into the contemporary social assets highlight how objects mediate a steadily growing number of human relationships [ 22 ]. In particular, epistemic cultures [ 23 ], i.e. communities of experts heavily relying on science theories, are a prominent phenomenon regarding a way of living and constantly interacting with objects of knowledge. The peculiarity of this condition is the never satis ed e ort of reaching the full knowledge, which, by de nition, is always lacking a completeness of being (cf. the \ethics of the (constant) need" mentioned above). Knorr Cetina depicts such tension in two ways: as an oscillation of sense that displaces the self for the sake of creativity; as a personal development of a better care and emotional sensitivity towards the \other-than-self" (i.e., things, people), to something that feeds a virtuous circle for self improvement [ 23 ]: care for the others that is also self-care (or caring for oneself in caring for the others).

Our recent study on IT Knowledge Artifacts [ 9 ] shed light on the apparently divergent assumptions and values that inform the design of tools by which to Proc. of Second International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2014 Como (Italy), May 27th, 2014 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).

Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.

manage knowledge in organizational settings. On the one hand there lies the (positivistic and masculine) idea of computational tools that give as much autonomously as possible the best (i.e., e ective, e cient, ...) output as a function of the available inputs and resources; on the other hand, the feminine and interpretivist idea of tools that mediate communication to foster socialization and cooperative practices (as also the making of decisions is) and that are exibly adapted to contingent situations. 3

For a newer and braver world

Our point is that focusing on the culture of participation must be posed as a sign of real innovation, as an opportunity to change the ruling model of computational support, and as never-to-be-repeated opportunity to imbue IT development with a new ethics. We have argued that acknowledging the nature of the current ethics (behind) IT design necessarily leads to a re ection on the importance to adopt an alternative ethics: an ethics that poses the design itself into a collaborative process between people and that helps them to co-de ne the environment where they will have to work and interact with each other.

This means at least two things: rst, to close the loop in a tighter way between designers and user, so that they can achieve and maintain a continuous and creative agreement through and upon the IT artifact. This would be a concrete way to adopt and unify the visionary ideals recently proposed by Carroll [ 12 ], Fischer [ 16 ] and de Souza [ 29 ]. But it also means, more importantly, to shift from an idea of IT as technology of control, to an idea of technology supporting conversations [ 28, 31 ] and human relationships. This would give again back responsibility to the users, now treated as mere consumer of an information and computation-based megaservice [ 25 ]: participation, then, as an opportunity to exert responsibility, active engagement and awareness of how a community can mobilize resources to shape a better future: as a return to \care" as the leading concept behind IT development and use [ 3 ].

In short we advocate new and renovated research e orts towards the design and the serious study of the feasibility of something at the intersection of the so called \epistemic objects" [ 23 ] and the \intellectual artifacts" [ 29 ]. The former are \ever unfolding" objects by which every member of a community can re ect, negotiate sense and critically express her own voice; the latter ones are de ned as those artifacts that embed a way to frame (express) a problem and trigger possible ways to co-construct its solutions, that is to agree upon them, before at a linguistic level and then at the level of an e ective and joined (co-ordinated) activity. These new \epistemic and participated" objects should be put to the test of life to see if they can improve: higher satisfaction in usage; higher representativity of stakeholders; a wider adoption and exploitation (or an adoption leading to less, or less severe, unintended consequences [ 19 ]); a lower cognitive burden and e ort in appropriation [ 15 ]; a more focused attention to the a ordances that are recalled to the mind and found in environmental and contextual signs, when people express and perform their \knowledgeable behaviors" [ 11 ]. Proc. of Second International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2014 Como (Italy), May 27th, 2014 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).

Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.

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