Glossary
Arrangement
Arrangements can be hard (physical) or soft (social). Hard arrangements are built things that can range in scale from desks to buses to cities. Soft arrangements are social (less tangible) arrangements, like language, hand shakes, grants, curricula, schedules, etc.
Close Reading
The term comes from literary criticism where it means a sustained and careful attention to what is in a short passage of text. It is used interchangeably with close observation to indicate a practice within visual arts critique where those looking at a work take a long time describing in plain language what is there - color, shapes, structure, textures as a way of deliberately grounding later interpretation of the work in shared and verbalized perceptions. In the civic design course we will introduce this as a way for us to examine the case studies that are at the center of the course. We will use close reading to help us see well together what the elements are of an intervention and how they shift the context without drifting too quickly into interpretation or valuation (i like it, i don’t like it) of the intervention.
Convergence
In the convergence phase of a design process, we focus in – selecting, specifying, and narrowing our choices.
Description Embeds Prescription
This is a phrase from Douglas Flemons, a family therapist and author whose practice is deeply influenced by the lineage of systems thinkers that includes Gregory Bateson, Paul Watzlawick and others. This is a phrase that points to the ways that our frameworks of description, the images with which we make sense of other images, both incline us to seeing certain things and disincline us from seeing others. It's related to the proverb “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Gregory Bateson used the term double description to suggest that everything can be seen more fully if described from at least two vantage points. For more on what it looks like to put this idea into practice see the ds4si paper Art and Activism: A Case Study that describes work done with young people to intervene at the level of explanatory systems.
Designerly Stance or Designerly Thinking
Thinking like a designer, or “designerly thinking", means we stay open to other people's ideas, we’re not afraid to change or let go of our own ideas, and we stay nimble to questioning ourselves and how we see the problem we are trying to solve.
Discovery
Learning the beliefs, ideas and practices of the people or place you will design for. Embedding oneself into the context and cultures of a place. The designer literally hopes to discover a new insight or angle from which to approach a problem.
Divergence
In the divergence phase of a design process, we work to open our thinking about the problem we want to solve.
Effect
We use the term “effects” to talk about the impacts that ideas and arrangements have on our everyday life and larger world. Effects are the emergent properties of multiple overlapping hard and soft arrangements. These include the large-scale effects of injustices based on racism, classism, sexism, etc.—effects like the achievement gap, vast income and health disparities, and the underrepresentation of women in the U.S. Congress. They also include the more mundane effects generated by everyday arrangements like the long lines outside women's bathrooms that result from the arrangement of men's and women's bathrooms.
Ideation
The intuition and art of design is in how one develops new ideas. Including but by no means limited to brainstorming, ideation is the work of generating a bounty of ideas that will get you to the ones worth pursuing. Ideation is about getting insights from a wide perspective of people inside and outside of a particular problem.
Iteration
This is where you put your idea out into the world as a real thing. However, it’s important to hold a designer’s stance—one where you are still learning about your idea’s impact and ready to go back into the design process to create new versions of the design.
Prototype
To prototype means to test or model a new idea with the intention to make improvements.
Social Intervention
The act of interfering with a condition to modify it or with a process to change its course.
Specification
Making ones’ ideas tangible. This is the part of the design process where you make prototypes of your idea. Generally potential users of your idea can actually touch your prototype, try it on and see if it works. Prototypes can move from extremely rough to quite realistic as you do rounds of intense feedback on your ideas.
Systems Thinking
In the late 1940s a group of thinkers from a range of disciplines came together to look at how engineering principles of positive and negative feedback loops might be used to gain insight into a wider range of phenomena. Many different lines of inquiry descend from that moment, from missile guidance systems and AI to family systems therapy and interactional approaches to the study of human communications. Among those driving the latter approaches, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson and the psychologist Paul Watzlawick and their many collaborators built a theoretical framework for seeing circuits of interaction where others saw linear interaction.
These thinkers and the writings they left behind were key influences in the practical and theoretical framing of ds4si. While they will not be taught directly as part of the Civic Design course, they ground the thinking that now shapes that course. For participants curious to learn more about how these ideas can inform civic design work, offerings in the Design Gym and books in the space provide some routes forward.
Key texts include:
Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution, Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch
Pragmatics of Human Communication, Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson
Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson
The Symbol and the Thing
“The symbol and the thing” refers to when we can point to something—a gesture, item, infrastructure, habit, etc.—that operates on both the symbolic and literal levels. By being both a symbol and a real thing, it becomes something we can point to, play with, amplify or make strange.
Ex’s—the hat in Let’s Flip It, the South End parking sign, the AIDS quilt, Sea of Pink
Amplifying the Unspoken
Much of the power of culture comes from the unspoken. By finding ways to amplify the unspoken, we are able to help populations engage and work with underlying assumptions and understandings. Some techniques we use include spectacle, making the normal strange, and making the strange familiar.
Ex’s—Barrington’s Effingee, the Grill Project, the chup chup souvenir
Productive Fiction
We use what we call “productive fictions” to create glimpses into what might be in the world we want, and build micro-spaces where that world already exists. These productive fictions create room for people to jump off our ideas and imagine new possibilities, as well as to imagine that sturdy things are changeable!
Ex’s—Public Kitchen, guerrilla-style bridge lighting in Upham’s Corner, South African Springboks
Looking for more resourCes?
Want to keep exploring? Visit our Library for more design resources to continue honing your designerly thinking.