=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1640/paper7
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|title=Should the Culture of Participation inform a new Ethics of Design?
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1640/paper7.pdf
|volume=Vol-1640
|authors=Angela Locoro,Federico Cabitza
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/avi/LocoroC14
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==Should the Culture of Participation inform a new Ethics of Design?==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1640/paper7.pdf
Should the Culture of Participation inform a
new Ethics of Design?
Angela Locoro1 and Federico Cabitza1
Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica e Comunicazione
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
Viale Sarca 336, 20126 Milano, Italy
{angela.locoro,cabitza}@disco.unimib.it
Abstract. This paper aims to reflect on the role of Culture of Partic-
ipation 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 first, 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 finding solutions.
Being aware of the message that a powerful knowledge technology may
convey offers a unprecedented instrument to improve ours and others
lives, when wisely and ethically understood. Starting from a critical con-
sideration of the “comfortable numbness” in mainstream IT design, we
would like to suggest how inescapable reflections 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
1 Motivations and Background
The expression “ethics of design” refers to a set of “norms [...] that should be ad-
hered 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 con-
sequences of the machines they produce. We also speak of an “ethics of design”
in the context of a discourse addressing whether the achievement and sustain-
ability 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 hu-
man communities.
33
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).
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This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
Historically, machine-centered (automated) information technologies have
been introduced (and found pervasive diffusion), to allow the modern state bu-
reaucracies to better control their material and economic flows, 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 interac-
tion are inscribed and afforded [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), de-
signing 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 world-
changing 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
diffusion 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] Open-
1
Interestingly, the English word ‘requirement’ subsumes both the meanings of ‘that
which is required’ and ‘need’.
34
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 efforts of the voluntary.
These new technologies have the power to overturn the idea that IT is script-
inscribed [2], and imposed to users by the designers (and by those supporting
their work, like the contractors), i.e., the masculine idea that conceives technol-
ogy as a tool for highhandedness and control, at a potentially worldwide scale;
and to introduce a different idea: the idea that IT is a tool for communication
and conversation [14], to improve participation of individuals within communi-
ties (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 reflection) your sense of identity, and reason to live for [10].
2 In the age of the smart design
Scholars in the field of STSs, and feminist studies in particular, made an effort
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 sub-
suming 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 de-
sign of artifacts has as its first, though implicit purpose, to convey a message [30].
And, as the most influential studies of communication predicted since the begin-
ning, the message can be everything (or everything involved in communication
can be the message) [26].
Investigations into the contemporary social assets highlight how objects me-
diate 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 satisfied effort of reaching the full knowledge, which, by definition, 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
35
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 au-
tonomously as possible the best (i.e., effective, efficient, ...) output as a function
of the available inputs and resources; on the other hand, the feminine and in-
terpretivist idea of tools that mediate communication to foster socialization and
cooperative practices (as also the making of decisions is) and that are flexibly
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 reflection 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-define the environment where
they will have to work and interact with each other.
This means at least two things: first, to close the loop in a tighter way be-
tween 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 re-
sponsibility 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 efforts 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 reflect,
negotiate sense and critically express her own voice; the latter ones are defined
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 effective 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 rep-
resentativity of stakeholders; a wider adoption and exploitation (or an adoption
leading to less, or less severe, unintended consequences [19]); a lower cognitive
burden and effort in appropriation [15]; a more focused attention to the affor-
dances that are recalled to the mind and found in environmental and contextual
signs, when people express and perform their “knowledgeable behaviors” [11].
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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.