Materialising Norms - Norm-Critical and Speculative Explorations in Design

Abstract

Design is increasingly called upon to address some of the acute issues of our time, such as social inequalities and climate change. While 'critical design' has claimed to address the concerns of design driving consumerism during the last two decades, it has also, in recent years, been criticised for overlooking issues relating to power and positionality by designers from post- and decolonial vantage points. The lack of a feminist perspective has also been sharply challenged. Thus, there is a need to deepen and diversify criticality in and through design in order to take on the complexity of social and ecological sustainability, without reproducing unjust power relations.

This thesis explores the potential contribution of the emerging norm-critical approach in a Swedish design context. Norm-critical theory has rapidly established a position as a means to interrogate structural discrimination in Swedish institutions and society; indeed, scholars even speak of a 'norm-critical turn'. However, the norm-critical approach in design is a nascent field: in order to sensitise norm-critical design as a research method to issues of power and positionality, it could benefit from methodological and theoretical development. To date, empirical examples of how the norm-critical perspective can be deployed in design practice are scarce in academic literature.

Methodologically, a hybridisation of the critical and feminist, qualitative research methods developed by sociologist Dorothy Smith along with research through design methods, is developed which explores the ways by which norms and power relations within organisations can be identified, analysed, and challenged. A series of artefacts articulate problematics connected to the norms and the power relations they produce in a physical form, forming 'discursive material theses'. The aim is to destabilise and challenge discriminating norms, thereby opening them up for renegotiations of corresponding power relations.

Theoretically, the thesis builds on norm-critical theory for the analysis of power relations founded on social norms. The thesis further explores the contributions of philosopher Michel Foucault to norm-critical theory and his theorisation of how norms build modern forms of power. Through Foucault, the thesis explores how 'technologies of power' are exercised through organisations articulated as 'micro-governmental institutions' mediated through designed artefacts, acting as 'governmental apparatuses'.

The thesis thus provides detailed empirical examples of how norm-critical research through design analyses of norms can be performed within organisations. The findings reveal and challenge specific norms in particular organisations but also theorise and expand beyond the particularities of these organisations, forming a larger image of the ways in which norms, mediated by design, build structural power in Western modernity marked by neoliberal transformation.