Welcome to unmaking as agonism using participatory design with youth to surface difference in an
intergenerational urban context. Let's start by defining the words "unmaking" and "agonism".
Unmaking is defined and invoked differently depending on the discipline and context. In
this paper, we approach it broadly as the intentional act of undoing, disassembling,
or destroying. Now what about agonism? One of the defining attributes of urban societies is that
they are riven with differences when it comes to age, race, language, religion, socioeconomic status,
and cultural traditions among others. Agonism is a theory from political philosophy. It states
that since society members are different, their conceptions of the good life are also different.
This means that the systems ordering our societies are never really complete even if they are based
on majority vote, because they cannot accommodate all of our needs and priorities. Agonism further
states that citizens must be able to engage in continuous contestational struggle for their needs,
which in turn requires permanent spaces for conflicts, confrontations, and making these
needs visible. Agonism has been taken up in HCI by several researchers and designers but all of these
works are making-centric. Given that designing for agonism often implies or desires the unmaking of
certain orders or hegemonies, we ask in this paper: What if we recognize unmaking as a design move
for agonism? How can unmaking articulate some of the conflicts that characterize urban populations?
And how do other people react to the conflicts arising from unmaking?
we shed insights on these questions through the ethnographic account of CivicDIY,
or the Civic Design Internship for Youth, a six-week summer program we organized in 2018
for a group of youth who live and attend the middle school in the vicinity of our campus -
which is located on an island. The youth gathered oral histories from the island
residents and identified a ubiquitous need for increasing social cohesion among them.
Our goal with CivicDIY was to address this through design interventions.
During the six weeks, we engaged the youth in design thinking exercises, took them to
design events on our campus, gathered more site and user data, synthesized the information as a group.
We did prototyping, desk crits, and group pinups, and we repeated these cycles a few times and presented
the final youth proposals at the local senior center to get pluralistic feedback on the ideas
and perhaps forward them to the island governing body for consideration. The youth proposals
started as tech-based artifacts and organically converged on place-based ideas that from their
perspective enhance social cohesion on the island. Their final designs included a VR zoo, spa kingdom,
BMX park, sightseeing river train, cultural center, floating shopping mall, and destroying the Pinnacle.
Now you might be wondering: how is that civic design? There are actually layers of agonism
inscribed in how we finally got to these proposals including the youth recasting what
civic means, contesting our adult-centric ways of seeing urban spaces, as well as engaging in
conflict - including amongst us the research team - which we detail and reflect on in the paper.
But what I would like to focus on here is the last proposal: destroying the Pinnacle. The Pinnacle is
an alias for a luxury condominium on the island which some of the youth proposed destroying
without any replacement as part of their design deliverables for civic diy. This unmaking proposal
- which took everyone in the program by surprise - did the work of agonism in multiple ways. As a
research team, it put us in conflict with the youth. It made us keep asking them: where is your design?
why do you want to destroy the Pinnacle? is this appropriate? can you give us a real design? It made
us consider with many of our colleagues several existential questions around design: is this
design? what makes something design? why is design making-centric? At the senior center, it generated
the most conflict with the youth and older adults passionately discussing and disagreeing about the
blunt laws that a proposal like this will bring as well as the youth audacity to even suggest it.
In post CivicDIY interviews and focus groups with the youth, we were finally able to grasp the reason
behind the proposal: the youth hated the Pinnacle's really exclusive and rich vibes which foregrounded
the financial burden many felt due to increasing gentrification on the island, and many of the youth
friends and classmates "disappearing" from their school as their families moved elsewhere.
So the youth were using this proposal as a tool to radically contest increasing social
disparity in their community through design. The agonistic potential of this unmaking
is perhaps best revealed when it's compared with other CivicDIY proposals such as this spa kingdom
and the others like it which entailed unmaking what existed on their sites but were not as
conflictual be it during the program or during the final presentations - perhaps because they
foregrounded what's to be gained and concealed what is to be lost. On the other hand, agonism
does seek to highlight and support those who lost and what is lost. Further, destroying the Pinnacle
as a solution to social disparity from the youth perspective did not promise a happily ever after.
And agonism indeed admits there's no happily ever after, which is unlike the VR zoo proposal which
everyone loved because it promised them a context where everyone could get what they wanted through
the infinite possibilities of virtual reality. Ultimately, destroying the Pinnacle made visible
some of the unmaking approaches that are inscribed in how we design, the valence in each approach, and
how much loss they require or conceal. This visibilization is at the heart of agonism.
To recap, unmaking in this project articulated social inequality on the island.
It raised discussions and passionate disagreements in ways that the other proposals did not.
And it showed that not all problems can have a satisfy all solution. Now that doesn't mean
unmaking is a global solution, and we speak in the paper about some of the accompanying complications.
So please refer to that and engage with us about unmaking in HCI through this paper, through the
CHI workshop that we are organizing in April, as well as through the unmakingatCHI hashtag. Thank you so much!