Trading off between control and autonomy: a narrative review around de-design

ABSTRACT

In this work, we provide an overview of contemporary perspectives of design that may challenge the traditional design of IT and socio-technical systems. Our starting metaphor is that of ‘wicked problems’, where the singularity, incompleteness and intrinsic uncertainty of real world settings foregrounds how the worldview that designers offer to practitioners may be optimal in theory but useless in practice. To go beyond traditional notions of design and designer, we intercepted insights coming from minoritarian voices in both theoretic and practice-based design fields. ‘De-design’ is a term we coined to encompass this wide spectrum of approaches that make more resilient and sustainable information artifact, de-emphasize design as a theoretical construct, and reconsider practice as the leading principle of digital innovation. This paper is a narrative review of voices in an extensive array of fields: from Information Systems to Human-Computer Interaction, from End-User Development to Critical Design, from Software Design to Design Studies. Our contribution retraces the motivational roots of de-design and tries to characterise de-design by filling relational gaps between disparate approaches and by bringing them back to IT and socio-technical design, to make digital artifacts sustainable in all of the new environmental, organisational and cultural spaces near to come.

KEYWORDS:

• De-design
• no design
• underdesign
• meta-design
• socio-technical system
• IT artifact

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Angela Locoro http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6740-8620

Notes

1 Wicked problems are open-ended problems which are known for having no fixed set of frames, rules, and solutions. Fixing one category means losing control over another. Their complexity is not reducible to true or false solutions, but to an array of fuzzy-like shades of good or bad options, each of which bears consequences that are difficult to foresee.

2 In 1923 Le Corbusier stated that houses were to be conceived (and hence designed) as ‘machines for living’ (‘une maison est une machine-à-habiter’). This resonates with the Tayloristic image of the ‘organisation as a machine’ (actually by a Taylor’s follower, Gantt). See also Evenson (1969), and Morgan (1997).

3 After all, OED defines design as ‘action of producing a plan’ (2002).

4 To this respect much of the work of a requirement analyst concerns the systematic undesign of the solutions suggested by the client in the first place, and their substitution with more feasible or cost-effective solutions (personal communication with the author).