DESIGN AS SITUATED RECONFIGURATION: TOWARD A TRANSDISCIPLINARY FRAMEWORK BETWEEN ECOLOGY AND DESIGN M. Six Silberman and B. Tomlinson 12 October 2009 Abstract Grappling meaningfully with the challenges posed by "the cluster of transformations labeled 'global change'" (Tainter 1996) means understanding 'large-scale' conditions and trends constituted by (and affecting in turn) 'small-scale' processes and actions; integrating perspectives from a large number of 'stakeholders'; and making sense of complex 'assemblages' made up of 'components' which fall traditionally under the purview of any number of different disciplines, sometimes with incommensurable epistemological assumptions, methodological commitments, interpretive practices, and norms around public engagement. There has been much recent design research concerned with possible and desirable interactions between designers, affected parties to specific issues under the 'global change' umbrella, 'policy-makers' and other authorities (for example in corporations), and other researchers, for example in ecology, political economy, and science and technology studies (STS). In particular we note: the Summer 2004 issue of Design Issues, in which environmental concerns and relevant approaches featured prominently and were explored within a transdisciplinary framework grounded in STS; the series of workshops and special sessions on sustainability in the last few years at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems ("CHI", and certainly the hegemonic if not necessarily the preeminent cross-sectoral conference in interaction design); Thackara's 2005 book In The Bubble, which introduced the concept of "design mindfulness" and enumerated a number of heuristics for a "mindful" design practice, some of them motivated centrally by ecological concerns; and the special sessions on sustainability at DRS 2008. Motivated by these challenges and inspired by the burgeoning literature concerned with 'sustainability' in design, in this paper we develop a metaphor for design which extends the metaphor, currently in wide use across disciplines and discourses, of a set of interconnecting actors as a 'network' or 'system': 'design as reconfiguration'. This metaphor allows us to describe design action, technology use, 'knowledge production', activism, advocacy, policy-making, the industrial production of objects, and so on within a common language: all of these activities are understood as 'situated reconfigurations' within a system. Following epistemological insights from second-order cybernetics (e.g., von Foerster 1979) and feminist theory (canonically, Haraway 1988), we understand both the 'actors' under study (e.g., designer, activist, policymaker) and the analyst (e.g., researcher) as constituents of the same system. We focus specifically on a set of questions concerning the relation between designers and 'sustainability'. First, what might we mean by 'sustainability' in the context of design practice? Second, why should designers care about 'sustainability'? Put another way, how do large-scale properties of systems (of which 'sustainability' is one) come to matter in the lives of individuals and communities, and how are they interpreted as susceptible to 'design intervention'? Third, how do we evaluate design interventions in terms of their effects on 'sustainability', before, during, and after the design process? Finally, how do we know when 'sustainability' is a desirable outcome, and when (and for how long) it should be subordinated to other, more immediate or 'local' concerns? In this paper, we develop the theoretical framework afforded by the metaphor of design as situated reconfiguration in the context of these questions through a number of design scenarios drawn from the literature mentioned above. Intertwining theoretical exposition with specific cases, we develop: + an operationalizable, design-relevant understanding of 'sustainability' derived from the relevant ecological literature (in particular Ulanowicz et al. 2009), which we argue is more helpful than the WCED definition of sustainability, or a "triple bottom line" perspective, which have been taken up recently in the sustainability-oriented literature in DRS; + a narrative account of the ways in which 'micro' practices, actions, and understandings constitute 'macro' conditions like 'sustainability', and how these conditions are in turn 'translated' back into 'micro' contexts, and are 'realized' as motivating factors in 'micro' decisions; and + an approach to situated design practice which affords principled decisions when long-term 'system values' like sustainability conflict with short-term human values or 'micro' 'goals', but which avoids the totalizing and panoptic impulse of technocratic (and techno-centric) approaches developed, for example, in discourses on ubiquitous computing and sustainability. We offer one case study within the framework in slightly greater depth: a mixed-methods, transdisciplinary, multi-scalar, multi-perspectival reading of the Mechanical Turk platform (mturk.com), a web-based "marketplace for work", and Turkopticon (turkopticon.differenceengines.com), a Firefox extension developed to begin addressing a pattern of worker exploitation which developed on the site. Assessing Turkopticon as a situated reconfiguration of Mechanical Turk, we examine the interaction between system properties like sustainability and vulnerability, lived experience of stakeholders, and design intervention. To conclude, we explore briefly the relation between (and possible intertwinings of) our framework and related perspectives from ecological economics (Holmberg et al.'s "socio-ecological principles for a sustainable society"); sociology of science (Callon, Latour, and Law's actor-network theory); systems dynamics (Meadows' "leverage points"); and design itself (Thackara's "design mindfulness"). This examination allows us to highlight both the promise and the risk of the framework we propose, and to offer a number of analytical and practical cautions and open questions. References Tainter, J. Complexity, problem solving, and sustainable societies. In Costanza et al., eds., Getting Down to Earth: Practical Applications of Ecological Economics. Island Press, 1996. von Foerster, H. Cybernetics of cybernetics. Public lecture, 1979. Transcript at tinyurl.com/cybernetics-of-cybernetics. Haraway, D. Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3): 575-599, 1988. Ulanowicz. R. E., et al. Quantifying sustainability: resilience, efficiency, and the return of information theory. Ecological Complexity 6(1): 27-36, 2009.