Everyday Design

This dissertation focuses on and investigates how a practice of design studies affects the development of new and challenging frameworks in design history and design culture in Canada. Using methods of curation, writing, and public discourse in order to refute “how Westerners have distinguished, named, sorted, grouped, gathered, and subsequently deployed material things in order to make knowledge claims about both
them and the emergent concepts their users have associated with them” (Ulrich et al, 2015), my research proposes a departure from the privileged spaces of Art Historical concepts such as originality, location, pedigree, and authorship in design history in order to build an inclusive and equitable approach to understanding design history. My research question guiding my work, asks: How might the use of unconventional theoretical frameworks disrupt existing structures used to critique design and establish networks of knowledge?

In order to explore this proposed approach and methodology for a design studies practice I have used Canadian design history — a generally unrecorded and unacknowledged field — as a case study for my research. Combining the knowledge that can be captured through material biographies and autobiographies with a desire to include anonymous and everyday design creates a potential for a recorded history that contemporary designers understand and see a way in which to contribute. At the core of this interrogation is the ongoing tension and conflict between the need to redefine frameworks and paradigms to suit Canadian design, and the dominant forces of the political economy of design, which benefits from stasis, or status quo of traditional historical frameworks. I propose that theories from other fields, particularly literature and narratology, can be more useful than the paradigms of Art History to investigate the contributions of ordinary and anonymous design to histories and canons.

More specifically, theories of adaptation as well as frameworks of folklore, borrowed from narratology and media studies, provide useful typology to position design within a historical context. “[Mobilizing] a wide vocabulary of active terms [including] version, variation, interpretation, continuation, transformation, imitation, pastiche, parody, forgery, travesty, transposition, revaluation, revision, rewriting, echo” (Sanders 2005), allows the much-needed conceptual space to discuss the contributions of Canadian design in its own way, within its own cultural context.

My design studies practice is represented by a framework of five actions and tactics — piercing, consigning, pivoting, transmuting, and spamming — each applied to four goals of conceptual findings — de-trashing, consigning, filtering, and constituting. This framework is populated by twenty projects of varying scope, resulting in an ongoing and active contribution to a body of work. It is intended to be interpreted by other design studies practitioners, adopted or adapted in order to build future networks of knowledge to “[contend] with what we have made” (Dilnot 2015), and to subvert the problematic categorization of design into inflexible design history canons.

This article examines one example of radical innovation and everyday design through a case study of Farm School NYC, an adult education programme in New York City that uses critical pedagogy and popular education to train adult students in urban farming, social justice advocacy and teaching skills. Drawing primarily from research conducted between 2013 and 2014 for a study on urban agriculture and social justice activism, the article illustrates how a network of urban agriculture practitioners, educators and activists created a community-based training programme that takes steps towards a broad vision of a socially just urban food system and that this represents a case of everyday design by radical innovation. It argues that understanding ways in which projects like Farm School NYC infuse radical visions of social change into their day-today educational activities is useful for those interested in supporting such transformative work through teaching, farming and gardening and design.

The objective of this paper is to identify the structural impossibility within the potential for designing our everyday life. In other words, the goal is to make a case – through a discussion of active citizenship during the era of globalised capitalism – for the necessity of the existence of unregulated islands of design activity. The paper tries to show why focusing on everyday design – design for life – should be of much greater importance than it is now. It also shows that in order to achieve this goal, design needs thinking individuals. It needs all those whose ordinary acts are overlooked today but are already happening in everyday life and are free from market domination. The task of design lies in recognising and empowering each of us. Consequently, the role of design – as one of the key builders of our environment – lies not only in redesigning the environment in order for it to ensure the requisite empowerment of individuals, but also in establishing the conditions for cre...

This thesis proposes and demonstrates Everyday Designing for Revaluing (ED4R) as a methodology and practice that happens beyond design studios and beyond use. My focus is on the stages in-between, after-use and before-reuse; when the value of objects has to be re-created. My proposal is based on my design research practice conducted at a second-hand charity shop (op-shop) in Melbourne, Australia, where I worked for over three years as a manager, volunteer, and design researcher. These embedded roles and the flexible character of this site enabled me to develop a series of collaborative design interventions, to re-create the value of things donated and transform them into products to be re-used by new owners. Through this research, I transformed my design practice from a 'traditional' industrial design orientation towards one that foregrounds participatory design (PD) and design anthropology (DA). This thesis presents Everyday Designing as an ongoing design process with revaluing as its intent. While revaluing extends the lifecycles of used things, it also involves creative forms of appropriation and improvisation as modes of designing within the socio-material routines at the op-shop. ED4R combines approaches from PD and DA through collaborations with staff, to explore forms of open-ended prototyping, to change existing systems and to work with contingent materials and situations. This approach included contesting, negotiating and deciding on how and what to revalue and why; challenging notions of planned obsolescence and reconsidering used things as resources for designing. I offer a theoretical framework, methodology and tangible illustrations of ED4R and, in doing so, seek to enrich practices and discourses of design and sustainability.

This paper is a follow up study of a 2005-2006 study of everyday design. This follow-up study is an opportunity to gain insights into the social evolution of everyday design systems in the home. We report on changes to five systems and discuss how these changes occurred over the last four to five years. We identify four factors related to the changes 1) shared value 2) mutual intelligibility, 3) materiality-substitutability, and 4) fit.

This article discusses how families appropriate artifacts and surroundings that lead to the design of everyday household systems, such as combining a chalkboard, a door frame, and a hanging basket with paper and sticky notes to manage lists and messages. Such systems continually evolve through the catalytic pressures of indi- vidual actions and design-in-use. The article reports on a study of four families in which the concept of everyday design in the home was being researched. In-depth descriptions and discussions of the observations and patterns are presented. The design implications of this study are also discussed. The research contributions are an explanation of everyday design as a novel way to understand interactions and routines in the home, descriptions of the key actions and process in everyday design, and the need to reconstruct the user in the sense of an everyday designer.

The objective of this paper is to identify the structural impossibility within the potential for designing our everyday life. In other words, the goal is to make a case – through a discussion of active citizenship during the era of globalised capitalism – for the necessity of the existence of unregulated islands of design activity. The paper tries to show why focusing on everyday design – design for life – should be of much greater importance than it is now. It also shows that in order to achieve this goal, design needs thinking individuals. It needs all those whose ordinary acts are overlooked today but are already happening in everyday life and are free from market domination. The task of design lies in recognising and empowering each of us. Consequently, the role of design – as one of the key builders of our environment – lies not only in redesigning the environment in order for it to ensure the requisite empowerment of individuals, but also in establishing the conditions for creating and encouraging new functions, new ways of thinking.

We discuss our study that looks at family members as
everyday designers. We explain the design actions family members to be creative, as evidenced by the resourceful appropriation of artifacts and surroundings, the ongoing adaptation of systems and routines through design-in-use that allows emergent properties to arise and addresses individual needs, and how implicit understanding and explicit tests occur for judging quality. We present a preliminary analysis of design implications in the area of interaction design in the home. Our findings are based on a five-month ethnographic study of three families.

The paper shows that the task of design lies in empowering each of us. Consequently, the role of design—as one of the key builders of our environment—lies not only in redesigning the environment, but also in establishing the conditions for creating and encouraging new ways of thinking. In other words, the goal is to make a case, through a discussion of active citizenship during the era of globalised capitalism, for the necessity of the existence of grassroots initiatives and unregulated islands of design activity. The paper shows why focusing on everyday design—design for life—should be of much greater importance than it is now.

In this paper we reflect on the notion of caring with in design research by discussing processes of cultivating and revaluing. Cultivating as a form of caring with other species. Revaluing as a form of caring with unwanted things. Both are addressed as everyday designing, ongoing liminal processes that have regenerative potential to revalue and care for/with dirty matters.

This paper presents the findings from an exploratory study that looks at how creativity plays a role in the repair and reuse of objects in the home. We are interested in a particular form of creativity that manifests in the everyday – what John Dewey [8] describes as a constant doing and undergoing, as we actively adjust to everyday situations. The goal of this study is to show evidence of repair as not only an act of restoration, but also as an act of creativity that entails the repurposing and resourcing of objects. This study is part of a larger research initiative known as the Everyday Design, where it is believed that everyone is a designer and that design is an ongoing activity that includes the repair, modification, and appropriation of design objects and systems. Furthermore, this study serves as baseline research for future investigations in how to inform the design of technologies whose lifecycle can be extended for various contexts of use through repair.

The Everyday starts right here, next to and within each one of us, in each repetitive action we take daily with the purpose of conducting our lives. Without the everyday, our existence would be not just impossible but unthinkable. Yet, as we all know too well, it is not easy to find happiness or satisfaction in the midst of ordinary life. In other words, there is a less obvious dimension of the everyday that needs our attention, work, permission, and invitation. And it is here where the role of architecture may be revolutionarily relevant. We are talking of a progressive architectural agenda with strategies and tactics that reveal, advance, and propitiate the liberating nature of the everyday instead of affirming and freezing its alienating dimension. Perhaps the fundamental role of architecture is to indicate, remember, and celebrate the sacred essence of that which-it-is.