Hi, I'm Maarten Smith and I'm presenting the paper:
'Scaffolding shared imagination with tangible design'
on behalf of Sander van der Zwan, Jelle Bruineberg, Pierre Lévy and Caroline Hummels.
Maybe it's helpful to begin by contextualizing the paper
in the broader line of research that we're carrying out
which is into a design philosophy correspondence
in a design philosophy correpondence
the practices of philosophy and design come together,
build upon each other and inform each other.
We're doing this research at the Transformative Practices
squad, which is part of the faculty of Industrial Design
at the Eindhoven University of Technology
In this paper we use ecological and enactive philosophical ideas
and a concrete design project to argue for and illustrate
imaginative affordances.
Before going into the details of this, it's helpful to
understand the theoretical backdrop, against which
the research takes place.
Now, design research and practice, and in particular
the TEI-community, have been succesful in promoting
skilled, embodied, unreflective coping over a reflective and
detached approach to everyday activities.
This is characterized by, for example, efforts to reduce
semantic pollution.
These efforts resonate with ecological and enactive
approaches to cognition, which form part of the theoretical
backbone of the community.
Now traditionally, these approaches have been able to
deal well with many of our practical, everyday activities.
In particular, what others have categorized as "lower"
cognitive abilities
such as interactions with daily tools, like riding a bike or
using a knife and fork.
However, it's also often claimed that these approaches fall short
when employed to account for "higher" cognitive abilities
such as imagination, or remembering or reflecting
Now, in response to this
recent movements in ecological and enactive philosophy
have shown that many of such "higher" cognitive activities
can also be regarded as shared and embodied.
To understand this response in a little more detail, let's take a
the notion of affordances and how ecological and enactive
philosophy scale affordances up.
The term affordance was first coined by James Gibson, who
defined it as action possibilities provided by
an environment to an organism.
It was then picked up on and altered by different practices,
like design research and philosophy and psychology.
From an ecological and enactive perspective, affordances have a
have a much broader application than just motor possibilities.
In short, they are relative to a form of life, so not dependent
on an individual.
They are also skill dependent, so they can be learned,
and they can be perceived as relevant or not.
In order to get a better understanding of how designing
for imagination can be approached from an
ecological and enactive perspective, we analyze a
concrete design project titled Expedition RWS2050.
In this project, Rijkswaterstaat which is the executive agency
of the Dutch Ministry for Infrastructure and Water Management
aims to imagine a range of possible futures so that it's
better prepared to anticipate and deal with the changing
situation in the Netherlands.
As part of this project, they invited our team to use our
design research skills and engage in discussions with
a cross-section of the Dutch population.
In doing so, we would imagine, together with them, what the
future could possibly look like and what it would mean for them.
To facilitate these imaginative discussions, we wrote seven
short, speculative stories
and designed a set of physical discussion tools.
Rijkswaterstaat requested that we base the discussions on
on a collection of demographic, economic, political,
socio-cultural, and technological trends.
We embedded these abstract, 3rd-person trends into stories
of everyday life, that participants could relate to
and presented them as audiobooks with accompanying imagery.
Next to this, we provided a playing field and a collection
of diverse objects, some recognizable,
such as wooden figurines,
and others, more abstract.
Throughout the discussions that followed, the interviewers
traced the conversation by placing physical objects and
post-its on the table.
The stories sketched a possible future world, but they were
written to leave a lot of space open for the participants'
imagination to work from.
Features and characters from the stories were placed in the
playing field, and provided a foothold for the participants
to imagine themselves in the possible future.
During the sessions, the traces formed on the playing field
afforded a number of actions.
Among others, they afforded including or excluding relations
from the imagined world by placing objects inside or
outside the boundaries of the playing-field.
They afforded summarizing things that were previously talked
about by pointing at the field.
They afforded remembering parts of the conversation
by looking at the field, and in doing so provided
the possibility to propose alternatives by rearranging,
removing and adding objects.
They afforded the interviewers to interpret what had been said
by tracing the conversation with the objects while in turn
affording participants to correct misunderstandings.
The material and social setting provided the opportunity to
to relate to the story and maintain a common ground.
Now we haven't done a comparative study between
the kind of imagining that was scaffolded by our final
design and the kind that would have been scaffolded by handing
participants the original trends that we started with.
Whether abstract trends afford imagining might also be a matter
of skill. It might be the case the case for an engineer
at Rijkswaterstaat, but not for the average Dutch citizen
At any rate, given the preceding analysis we think it's plausible
to say that the stories, the social setting and the
discussion tools tapped into our embodied potential for
meaning-making in a way that the abstract trends alone
would not have been able to do,
or at least not for average Dutch citizens.
Our goal with this paper was to show that arranging the social
setting and designing the tools has an influence on the kind of
imaginative process that can unfold.
The three examples detailed in the paper help to concretize
this view.
The participants are not first imagining a future world in
their heads, and then building this world from the objects at
the table.
Rather, relations made by tracing the conversation
and assigning meaning to objects
and the way that other participants act in the process
become affordances for further imagination.
In other words, the imagined future world unfolds in
the shared placing, replacing, moving, taking away
and talking about the artefacts on the table.
Imagination, from this perspective,
can be regarded as a shared and scaffolded activity.
Guided by recent developments in ecological and enactive
philosophy, we started from the assumption that many of our
intellectual activities are concrete, situated and
scaffolded by our sociomaterial environment.
Reflection and skilled engagement are not orthogonal activities,
they are rather interdependent.
In this instance, the activity of imagination was done by
pointing, negotiating, talking, probing and reflecting.
Imagination in these examples is in the enactment of affordances.
It's in the doing.
As Shaun Gallagher puts it:
"In this respect, the imaginative practice is to
manipulate concepts, thoughts, images —take them up
and play with them, move them around
in order to solve a problem, or map them onto
novel affordance spaces."
The imaginative practice is a social, material and therefore
tangible practice, in which design can take part.