CHI Workshop

ABSTRACT: This short piece, far too short for the space it demands, spins togeth­er a live­ly and unwieldy sto­ry about methods—the prac­tices we in design and design research fol­low to both know about the world and to have an affect on it. We spec­u­late on a mode of doing design inflect­ed with ques­tions about what we are doing when we study and inter­vene in the world. This is a project full with the hope of renewed design­er­ly meth­ods that make more of/in the world; that pro­mote a flour­ish­ing of dif­fer­ence; and that might just lead to mod­est but bet­ter ways of liv­ing and dying togeth­er. Our phi­los­o­phy (if that is not too grand a word for it) comes less from a ”stand­ing on the shoul­ders” of any one per­son, and more a think­ing through and with fem­i­nist ways of know­ing, doing, and being. Weav­ing into a mesh of ideas from the likes of Barad, Der­ri­da, Dewey, Durkheim, Hack­ing, Har­away, Law, Stengers, and so on, we find there to be trou­bles between the ways we come to know the world (doings, meth­ods or prac­tices), and what we know (know­ings or the­o­ries). The prob­lem­at­ic dis­tinc­tion between such doings and know­ings, and the murky worlds between them, open up a space for think­ing-doing a world oth­er­wise. When we come to accept that what we do and what we know are always already togeth­er, and that this ’togeth­er­ness’ is all the world can be, then we, in design, are left with a begin­ning: “What worlds do we want to do-know?”