Confronting bureaucracies and assessing value in the co-production of social design research

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the issue of assessing the value of social design research. It locates the emergence of social design practice and research against a background in which public and social organisations are increasingly bureaucratised as a result of New Public Management and shifts to New Public Governance. Within universities, too, organisational processes and structures require research to demonstrate impact within an audit culture. Through the study presented in this paper, we claim that the bureaucracies found in contemporary academia are ill-equipped to adequately assess generative, impactful, and multi-sited research in which value is co-produced with diverse participants. This presents challenges when attempting to understand the value of social design research. Building on social research and studies of innovation policy, sustainable human-computer interaction and evaluation, we define social design research as inventive, contingent, and political. To address the issue of its evaluation, we propose two-stage social design research. In the first stage, research issues, questions, methods, data, and ‘proto-publics’ are assembled, which reveal the conflicting framings and ways that value is assessed. These are re-assembled in a second stage during which the research is stabilised. The findings have implications for research managers, academics and their partners, and university administrators.

KEYWORDS:

• Social design research
• social design
• interdisciplinarity
• multi-disciplinarity
• knowledge exchange

Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers whose detailed feedback allowed us to significantly improve this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. There is a growing awareness of the ethical and political challenges of bringing approaches from design practice into social issues, even while the activity grows apace through the activities of funders, government bodies, consultancies and the translation of design approaches into toolkits (e.g. the Development Impact and You Toolkit, http://diytoolkit.org/ accessed 10 July 2018). See, for example, von Busch and Palmås (2016) and Fisher and Gamman (2019).

2. Through 2015, we directed a programme to explore the potential and limits of social design research in terms of its academic practices and the bureaucratic conventions that it might challenge, commissioned by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The programme was entitled ‘Developing participation in social design: Prototyping projects, programmes and policies’ (a.k.a. ProtoPublics; see Julier and Kimbell 2016). It included 14 interviews with academics and practitioners including those working in urban studies, mobilities research, science and technology studies and geography; three workshops; and five commissioned cross-disciplinary projects involving 34 people from four universities and four partner organisations working with 12 collaborating organisations. This study followed on from two other initiatives that we led: a series of public talks and debates on social design through 2012 and 2013; and a study for the AHRC in 2013–14, that resulted in an argument for building capacity in social design research (Armstrong et al. 2014).

3. The first author is based in the UK working in a university specialising in design and the arts; the second author has for many years worked in the UK but is now in a design department of a university in Finland.

4. The European Commission (2018) frames its future innovation and research strategy partly in relation to global issues including sustainability.

5. Both authors are using the approach to shape new research projects but this is at an early stage.

6. See, for example, the international Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium bringing together policymakers and funding agencies. http://tipconsortium.net, accessed 29 November 2018.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the AHRC under Grants AH/L503952/1 and AH/N504269/1.