Design thinking and Margaret Archer's model of social agency

Design thinking is a set of methods used by designers to assist in addressing complex social problems. Reading Margaret Archer's recent book on social agency and reflexivity provides a better understanding of how design thinking might be a powerful, effective, designerly approach to personal development and social change.

What differentiates design thinking from traditional product design? Social agency through (collective) reflexivity. Product design works at a more mechanistic level, assuming the starting point of a user with specific needs and capabilities, to deliver a product with appropriate affordances and constraints. On the other hand, design thinking accepts that users (now participants in design activity) bring to the process their own unique and independent dynamic of value and meaning formation. The important move is to realise that this "subjectivity" is paramount - in fact it is the well-spring of all that is valuable in human life. It's not to be dismissed as troublesome variation, but rather to be engaged with as a productive, value creating dynamic. Design thinking then adds to that a forum around which a diversity of individuals can negotiate social, technical, environmental, practical change through which they can collectively express or address their personal values and needs. The result should be new practices, new objects and environments to support those practices. These collective changes are the objects of design. But it's not simple, linear. Almost certainly the individuals are changed by the process.

In her book Making Our Way Through the World (2007), the sociologist Margaret Archer argues against a hydraulic deterministic model of social mobility. Archer proposes a three stage approach:

People form their own concerns (things that matter to them) in various ways. Archer argues that the individual internal conversation mediates the acquisition and transformation of concerns. In the three stage model, action on individual concerns is taken through projects that are formed and executed, but also subject to micro-political forces (for example, time available for a personal project might have to be negotiated with others). A successful project would result in a change in the life (practices) of the individual. The modus vivendi would in effect have been redesigned.

There are three obvious points at which this social agency might be disrupted or blocked:

• The individual may have difficulty in "defining and dovetailing" concerns - Archer's main aim of the book is to explore how variations in the reflexive internal conversation might effect this.
  
• The individual may struggle to translate concerns into projects - again variations in reflexive mode have an effect, along with social pressures and the available practices (there's a chicken-and-egg problem in there, without good practices, projects will never get formed effectively).
  
• Projects may fail to establish sustained changed in practices.
  

Returning to design thinking, we can reconsider it's methods in the light of this three stage model. It provides us with methods that can help with the reflexive formation and transformation of concerns (although it needs to be informed by Archer's work on individual variation in modes of reflexivity). It provides methods that assist with the translation of concerns into projects. It is particularly good at dealing with the micro-political issues that might disrupt or block projects. Given that the aim is to design and form better practices, design thinking provides practices that can boot-strap the three stage process that leads to the design and implementation of new practices. It is, in this way, a method for enabling emergent, non-linear, designerly social action for complex dynamic social intelligences.

Robert O'Toole : 19 Apr 2011 07:36 |  Tags: Inspiration |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem