Yamil Hasbun
Understanding design as a messy
socio-technical Actor-Network
Received: 10.05.2021
Reviewed: 08.06.2021
Published: 30.06.2021
How to cite this article
Hasbun,Y., 2021. Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network
Inmaterial. Diseño, Arte y Sociedad, 6 (11), pp. 47-68
48
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
Abstract
Drawing on key analytical principles of Actor-Network eory and
Science and Technology Studies, the present paper introduces a
material semiotic study on the agency of non-human entities in the
performative construction of new emerging realities, materialized
in the creative conception, representation and circulation of objects
understood simply as’ design’. Hence, its focus will be in reecting on
the ability of material objects –models, sketches, renderings, etc.– to
actively determine the emergence of new creative realities (designs)
that takes place daily in our classrooms, workshops and studios. Its
intention is to contribute to the growing academic work that seeks out
to equip design teachers and researchers for the construction of an al-
ternative design theory capable of understanding design as a more than
human endeavor.
ree arguments are drawn: First, that the creative process of design
is characteristically messy, contingent and non-linear, rather than the
orderly, controllable and linear account that key design textbooks have
largely suggested. Second, that design should be understood as a pro-
cess that necessarily relies on a balance between the presence of certain
material entities and the simultaneous absence of others; and lastly,
that much of the mess that characterizes the creative process of design
is result of the intricate diculties that arise in the process of constant
negotiations between ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ actors.
All three arguments suggest the need to reinterpret a series of black
boxes that both designers and design teachers have largely tended to
ignore despite the heterogeneous and messy nature of our discipline.
Keywords: design, creativity, materiality, non-human, Actor-Network
eory
49
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
Resumen
Entendiendo el diseño como una red socio técnica desordenada.
Basándose en principios analíticos clave de la Teoría del Actor-Red
y de los Estudios Sociales sobre Ciencia y Tecnología, el presente
artículo presenta un estudio semiótico material sobre la agencia de
entidades no humanas en la construcción performativa de nuevas
realidades emergentes materializadas en la concepción creativa, la
representación y la circulación de objetos comúnmente entendidos
simplemente como ‘diseño’. Por tanto, su enfoque estará en reexio-
nar sobre la capacidad de los objetos materiales –modelos, bocetos,
etc.– para activamente determinar el surgimiento de nuevas realidades
creativas (diseños) que se dan a diario en nuestras aulas y talleres. Su
intención es contribuir al creciente cuerpo de trabajo académico que
busca equipar analíticamente a profesores e investigadores del diseño
para la construcción de una teoría del diseño alternativa que sea capaz
de entender el diseño como un asunto más que humano.
Se cimientan tres argumentos: Primero, que el proceso creativo de
diseño es característicamente desordenado, contingente y no lineal, en
lugar de la explicación ordenada, controlable y lineal que algunos libros
de texto clave sobre la teoría y metodología del diseño han tendido a
sugerido. Segundo, que el diseño debe entenderse como un proceso
que irremediablemente se basa en un equilibrio entre la presencia de
ciertas entidades materiales y la ausencia simultánea de otras; y, por
último, que gran parte del desorden que caracteriza el proceso creativo
de diseño es el resultado de las intrincadas dicultades que surgen en el
proceso de negociaciones constantes entre actores ‘humanos’ y actores
‘no humanos’.
Palabras clave: diseño, creatividad, materialidad, no-humano, Teoría
Actor-Red.
50
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
is contribution intends to spark the interest of academics who are involved in
practicing, teaching, or researching any type of design by reecting on the acti-
ve role of material entities—models, sketches, renderings, etc.—in shaping the
emergence of design objects, and in inuencing the very nature of the performa-
tive design practices in which we (design practitioners, teachers and students) are
engaged in day-to-day.
More precisely, the paper discusses how human/non-human interfaces allow ‘good’
design ideas to be simplied (Callon and Latour 1981; Law 1992) and recorded
(Kaltho, 2005) in models, drawings and renderings while others get ‘erased’ in di-
gital or physical trash bins. Drawing on Actor-Network eory (ANT), and Scien-
ce and Technology Studies (STS), this paper addresses how designers and design
students are commonly struck by unexpected ideas and possibilities as they sketch
or build models. e empirical evidence to support these discussions derives from
my personal experience as a lecturer, and later as an associate professor, at the Es-
cuela de Arte y Comunicación Visual (School of Arts and Visual Communication)
at the Universidad Nacional of Costa Rica.
By introducing a material semiotic study on the agency of non-human entities in
the performative construction of emergent design realities, this paper responds
to the call made by Wilkie (2016) to “move away from the normative politics of
design […] where what counts as human and what counts as the technological is
pre-given, to an unxed, heterogeneous and emergent political ontology” (p. 876).
is ontology would portray design ¬as both a practice, and a distinctive domain of
expertise capable of novel ontological possibilities t to participate in the collective
construction of our world. erefore, its immediate intention is to contribute to
the growing academic work that combines the conceptual and analytical resources
oered by ANT and STS with the inventive methods (Lury and Wakeford, 2012)
involved in practice-led design research (Wilkie, 2016); while its far-reaching goal
is to help equip design teachers and researchers for the construction of an alterna-
tive design theory capable of understanding our particular knowledge eld and our
daily situated practices as a more-than-human endeavor.
Rather than discussing the state of the research in the subject, this paper will rst
illustrate the specic context in which the relevant actors are followed as they act,
and thus the local sites where observations take place. is will allow me to es-
tablish some of the general variables that describe the way in which the research
problem is performatively constructed (rather than simply dened). More precise-
ly, this paper elaborates a recognizable characterization of the way creative design
51
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
processes are commonly enacted (i.e. accepted or understood) as neat,
linear, ordered, and controllable things.
Aer introducing this general illustration, the paper will begin a dis-
cussion about the dierent issues and notions that shape this particular
narrative. I will argue that the urge to characterize design—as a verb—
as a neat, linear, and ‘exact’ process (and thus a method) originates in a
generalized obsession to legitimize design—as a subject—as a ‘serious’,
‘robust’ and ‘rational’ discipline. I will argue that this legitimization is
rooted in the imitation of the modernist illusion of an objective ‘scienti-
c method’ capable of rigorously approaching a positively given world.
Once the above discussion has been engaged, I will follow up with a
critical reection on some relevant aspects of my own teaching expe-
rience in the training of future professionals in visual arts, and graphic
and environmental design. To do so, I will resort to the use of selected
documentary material as recorded testimonies of the particular creati-
ve processes followed by my students through the years.
e discussion of these empirical ndings will allow me to establish
three conceptual hypotheses: rst, that rather than linear, neat, ordered
and controllable, the implicit creative process of designing is, in practi-
ce, messy, mutable, local and uid (Law and Singleton, 2005). Further-
more, I will discuss how the work of the designer is one characteristica-
lly mediated by contingency, subjectivity and guesswork.
Second, I argue that far from rendering the design process as a linear
journey that departs from the denition of a problem, eventually
arriving at a particular solution that is then materialized in a designed
object, product or space, the design practice should instead be unders-
tood as a uid and precarious process that necessarily relies on a paer-
ned exchange of presence and absence. In other words, doing design is a
contingent process characterized by the stabilization of certain enact-
ments of reality, at the expense of alternative others. All of which once
again reinforces a positivist understanding of design that largely conti-
nues to prevail in many teaching seings of this discipline worldwide.
My third and nal hypothesis is that a large part of this embedded mess
(Law and Singleton, 2005), which characterizes creative design pro-
52
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
cesses, is the result of the very diculties that constantly arise in the
incessant negotiations between designers and a vast array of material
entities who jointly co-construct the objects, products or spaces we
simply punctualize (Law, 1992) as ‘the design’. erefore, this third
hypothesis explores the way in which the ‘non-human’ material entities
(Whatmore, 2006) that participate in a design process (commonly or-
ganized in actor-networks known as models, sketches, planimetry, etc.)
do so actively and partially independent from the designer; and what is
more, oen ‘stubbornly’ or ‘unexpectedly’.
The imaginary linearity in the design process
To this date as an associate professor, and ever since my own years as
a design student at the Escuela de Arte y Comunicación Visual, a wides-
pread understanding of the design process as a linear and reductive rou-
te persists in many of our courses and workshops. is understanding
can easily be traced back to the very selection of the basic textbooks still
in use in the vast majority of courses that make up our current curricu-
lum. Particularly, the majority, if not all, the classes where students learn
basic design methodology are now based on the use of Bruno Munari’s
textbooks, predominantly his 1981 Da Cosa Nasce Cosa (or ¿Cómo
nacen los objetos?, as we know it in the Spanish-speaking world).
Before I aempt to oer my own impressions on the aforementioned
work, I would like to clarify that the purpose of these few propositions
should not be misread as an absurd aempt to belile Munari’s inva-
luable work, or even to hint that this work is ‘outdated’ or somehow
‘awed’. On the contrary, my own experience as a university teacher has
proven to me that Munari’s methodological proposal builds a robust
and very valuable didactic tool for introducing design and art students
(mainly those in the rst stages of the study program) to the solution
of specic design problems. In my experience, the approach oered
by this Italian designer is particularly useful at the earlier stages of a
program when students have not accumulated a basic experience in the
design eld that would allow them to dierentiate between design im-
plementation of a priori preconceived ideas, and the implementation of
emerging design concepts a posteriori the empirical and analytical work
to fully grasp the multiple variables that come into play in a design pro-
cess. ese are variables that Munari orders in ‘stages’ which he calls
53
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
‘problem denition’, (dissecting) ‘the elements of the problem’ and the
‘analysis of data’. However, in this paper I propose contrasting Munari’s
work with an inherently dierent epistemological vantage point from
the one followed by the original author himself, and from which his
work is commonly appreciated.
Firstly, and starting from the general and moving to the specic, the
ultimate purpose of Munari’s approach is to provide us with a practi-
cal method based on the notion that “If we rst learn to face smaller
problems, it would later be possible to solve larger ones” (Munari,
2004, p. 10, author’s translation). erefore, the method involves sol-
ving complex problems from an eminently reductionist philosophical
perspective. What is more, I believe that analytical sensibilities rooted
in material semiotics (Law, 2007) can only rearm the epistemological
starting point established by Munari, since they both concur that every
network, assembly or problem is the result of the constant and active
interaction between smaller and smaller elements or actors; and hence-
forth that (design) problems are, in turn, nothing more than the result
of a complex assembly of these intertwined ‘smaller’ actors.
However, Munari’s approach presupposes the fundamental proposition
that every problem, from the most complex to the simplest, has a ‘solu-
tion’ that can be reached by following a method; one that is inherently
based on a Cartesian paradigm which itself operates on the premise
that an objectively given physical world is the sum of static, indierent
and undeviating closed systems. In other words, it remains largely be-
lieved that this method is capable of ‘deconstructing’ a problem into its
‘invariable’ constituent elements which can in turn be analyzed sepa-
rately bit by bit, and reorganized time and again (Munari, 2004, p. 46).
More precisely, Munari argues that the possibility of deconstructing
a problem into its elements allows for a beer projection or solution
because “Once the small problems are solved one at a time, they can be
coherently recomposed from all the functional characteristics of each
of the parts. Functional characteristics that themselves derive from
inherent material, psychological, ergonomic, structural, economic and,
nally, formal properties” (Munari, 2004, p. 44, author’s translation).
With this, Munari unequivocally aligns his methodological model
within an eminently positivist paradigmatic approach that assumes that
54
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
the world’s ‘objectively given’ problems can be approached, ordered
and solved through the ‘scientic method’, and hence from the ‘objecti-
ve’ or ‘indierent’ aitude of a designer (subject) towards the space or
product being designed (object).
is starting point, apart from presupposing the existence of a structural
order of reality, seeks to ‘legitimize’ design as a quasi-scientic activity.
According to Schön (1983), this obsession of transferring a ‘rigor or
relevance’ to some areas of practice conveys that “there is a high, hard
ground where practitioners can make eective use of research-based
theory and technique, and there is (in contrast) a swampy lowland whe-
re situations are confusing ‘messes’ incapable of technical solution” (p.
42. Emphasis added). In other words, Munari’s approach seeks to trans-
fer the ‘rigor’ that Schön speaks about to design (as a eld of knowledge
and as a pragmatic discipline), a rigor that modernism has traditionally
aributed to the ‘high grounded’ eld of ‘natural sciences’
1
.
Munari argues that his methodology—which, as I suggest here, expli-
citly seeks to imitate the Cartesian scientic method—is, ultimately, a
method that forwards a certain enactment of knowledge that contains
a ‘liberatory value’. A value that allows the designer to understand
‘what has to be done or known’ to solve a problem (Munari, 2004, p.
12). Now, Munari emphatically insists that his method “simply consists
of a series of necessary operations, arranged in a logical order dictated
by experience” (Munari, 2004, p. 18. Emphasis added. Author’s trans-
lation). erefore, the nal design or ‘solution’, as he puts it, can be pos-
sible only if the dierent steps that the author enumerates throughout
his methodological proposal are followed; and only if these steps are
followed in the sequential linear order that his method conveys.
However, I ask: how linear is the design process in practical reality?
In my experience, it is sucient to observe, with some level of detail,
the dynamics followed by design students enrolled in workshops
that implement any supposedly linear design methodologies (such
as Munari’s) to witness how they oen begin to build a conceptual
solution to a certain design problem, only to realize that something
they had proposed at an early stage of the project does not quite work
1
is does not quite apply to the ‘social sciences’.
55
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
as they rst imagined. Commonly this is due to either the appearance
of an unexpected technical, material or expressive challenge; or the
haste to obtain a ‘result’ within a certain timeframe, and under certain
economic resources; or simply because of a change of heart, interest or
expectation of the designer.
In all these cases—and many other similar ones—not only are students
reluctant to ‘go back’ and rethink their own generative ideas out of a fear
that such a dynamic may threaten their chances of ‘nishing’ the works-
hop with a ‘presentable’ design; but we teachers nd ourselves oen en-
couraging students to ‘‘go back’’ as many times as necessary to ‘rethink’,
‘redraw’ and ‘rene’ their own designs, thereby building a ‘project log’
full of diagrams, sketches and models we simply call ‘process’, which will
eventually be put under quantitative and qualitative evaluation.
I will now argue that in practice, the description I provide in this
section of the non-linear nature of the design process does not sit well
with Munari’s—theoretical—proposal which famously drew the analo-
gical example of comparing the design process with the elaboration of
‘green rice’ in which the author argues that “you cannot add rice to the
casserole without rst adding the water; or sauté the ham and onion
aer having cooked the rice […]. Otherwise, the green rice project
will be a failure and will have to be thrown away” (Munari, 2004, p. 18.
Author’s translation).
Additionally, I would like to remind the reader that this proposition is
not entirely new. On the contrary, my argument departs from the no-
tions of divergent thinking and problem seing which produced the rst
explicit distancing from the linear ‘problem solving’ tradition embed-
ded in positivist technical rationality. More precisely, contrary to the
later tradition, divergent design encourages the designer to generate as
many creative ideas as possible through the iterative and spontaneous
exploration of multiple solutions to an uncertain situation (Runco,
2020), while problem seing is a process which interactively defines the
decision to be made, the ends to be achieved, and the means that can
be chosen (Schön, 1983, p. 40).
Far from limiting myself to arguing that the divorce between the two
former postulates simply responds to an alleged ‘unavoidable disso-
56
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
ciation’ that we have arguably learned to expect between ‘practice’ and
‘theory’; or to elaborate on the notion that, as Munari puts it, the lack
of ‘order’ leads to ‘chaos’; I am interested in questioning the very idea
that design is something that is at all orderable. To do this, I again refer
to the familiar ‘project log’ prepared by design students, which I belie-
ve is in some way equivalent to the metaphorical garbage dump where
Munari will ultimately dispose of his burnt rice.
e following images, taken from selected ‘nal’ project reports from
License Degree students enrolled in a particular graduation seminar
under my supervision, show a series of design explorations where
design students combined the use of textile as both an ephemeral
expressive medium, and a lightweight roong solution. Eventually, the
design team scrapped the idea, switching to the use of tense industrial
structures and other more conventional systems.
Image 1. Students’ explorative working models for the ‘IP’ project in the 2012 Graduation Seminar in
Arts and Visual Communications. e models show how the students rst proposed the use of textiles
as an ephemeral expressive medium and as a light roong solution. Eventually, the design team discarded
the idea and switched to the use of industrial tensile structures and other more conventional constructive
systems.
57
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
Typically, a design project in a university teaching and
learning context is constructed around a ‘roadmap’ that
teachers elaborate to set ‘the rules’ of the game. us, the
student’s task is to propose a ‘solution’ to the challenge
materialized in the design of an object or space; or as Mu-
nari describes it, a ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’. Commonly,
teachers set a number of hypothetical variables through
which students must navigate in search of their emerging
proposals. ese typically include a hypothetical custo-
mer, or target audience or user; a series of objectives to
be achieved by or through the design; and usually some
element of specicity that restricts the overall temporal,
spatial or material framework of the project (for example,
the selection of possible geographical sites or contexts; a
set of constraints in the allowable formats of the submi-
able proposals; a certain restriction in the materials or
techniques to be used; a deadline, etc.). Following Schön
(1983), we can establish here a rupture between these tra-
ditional ‘problem seing’ classroom dynamics and those of
‘real-world practices’
2
—prescribed in the problem seing
paradigm where “problems do not present themselves to
the practitioner as givens. [Instead] they must be construc-
ted from the materials of problematic situations which are
puzzling, troubling, and uncertain” (p.40). Again, depar-
ting from the preset constraints described above, students
generally develop a series of sketches, models, diagrams
and notes where their ideas are ‘gradually’ translated
(Callon, 1986) from an ‘abstract’ and non-material plane
of ideas to a ‘concrete’ and material one ruled by material
objects, or more precisely, things (Latour, 2008).
I contend that suggesting that a ‘nal design’ is the result of
a gradual ensemble of things, or a kind of creative ‘evolu-
tion’
3
of ideas materialized in models and sketches would
only be partially true at best. While it is true that certain
ideas generated in a sketch may transcend in one way or
2
Whether they take place in those same classrooms or in a practitioner’s design studio.
3
‘Evolution’ understood here in its Darwinian denition as found in biology.
58
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
another to the following sketch and so on until reaching that ‘nal de-
sign’, what eventually happens to these ‘non-nal’ sketches? Put die-
rently, as students carefully—almost ritually—display their ‘nished’
proposals on the walls and tables of the design workshop at the end of
each semester, what has become of all the quick and dirty sketches that
allowed those neatly polished—and apparently static—‘new’ realities
to emerge? Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that ‘nished’ designs
are commonly understood as singular and almost monolithic entities
that one arrives to by means of gradually ‘polishing’ or ‘cleaning up’
an otherwise ‘unnished’ proposal. All things considered, I contend
that students do not produce morphologically uid and mutable (Law,
2007) models and sketches capable of continuously transforming
themselves as many times as required to nally arrive at the ‘nished’
design that the designer envisioned in the rst place. Instead, I argue
that designers produce a series of unique, static, unrepeatable and ne-
cessarily unnished enactments—materialized in two- or three-dimen-
sional inscriptions—that will eventually end up in the workshop’s trash
bins as the designs are ‘polished’ and ‘re-wrien’ into their nal ‘clean’
versions. erefore, I ask: what is design if not a contingent and episte-
mologically messy activity? And consequently, what are design objects
if not ontologically uid, multiple, mutable and precarious entities?
However, Munari (2004), who without the slightest hesitation holds
that “everything is easy when you know what to do in order to reach a
solution to a problem” (p. 10) aributes any latent diculty of pur-
suing design solution through his strategy to either technical failures
(thus strictly rooted in a methodological insuciency), or to mana-
gerial failures understood as problems derived from the inability to
‘orderly’ manipulate or manage the design object (Law and Singleton,
2005). erefore, following the laer authors, I propose an unders-
tanding of design as a messy object that, due to its own ontological
condition, resists being technically and managerially ordered. More
specically, I agree with Latour’s (2008) and Yaneva’s (2009) call to
understand design as an ontologically multiple object of study insofar
as it characteristically emerges not only from multiple interpretations
(that is, from a diversity of simultaneous epistemological perspectives),
59
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
but from multiple performative representations
4
. To reinforce this last
argument, I again refer to the role played by ‘two-’ and ‘three-dimensio-
nal’ material inscriptions
5
(Latour, 1987) in the design process.
As I suggested earlier, each inscription (models, sketches, and notes)
produced by design students with the intention of ‘arriving’ at the nal
design of a particular problem represents a construction of a particular
reality in itself. By literally and guratively discarding each of these
material objects in the workshop’s trash bins, or by ‘bundling’ them up
with each other in the submied project logs that are evaluated at the
end of each semester, the possibility for alternative realities to emerge
from those other than from the ‘nal design’ is also being discarded.
is statement echoes Timmermans and Epstein’s (2010) proposal
regarding the typical standardization processes
6
of the industrial and
post-industrial economy by stating that “Just as the choice of one
standard (or in our case, a design) over another signals a preference
for a specic logic and set of priorities, so the choice of standards of
any sort implies one way of regulating and coordinating social life at
the expense of alternative modes” (Timmermans and Epstein, 2010,
p. 85). In other words, behind each ‘nal design’ there is an inevitable
process of synthesis, evaluation and discrimination that allows certain
realities (material, social, aesthetic, etc.) to emerge at the expense of
others. erefore, whenever we are confronted with a ‘nal design’ we
must bear in mind that these constructions are nothing less than the
partial and materialized result of certain versions of a reality that de-
pend on the balance and the interaction between entities made present
and absent. In other words, each ‘nal design’ implies the loss of certain
alternative versions of reality, and therefore simultaneously of other
paths to understand, act, and make decisions in the world.
4
Representations to be understood here not as the Peircean substitution of an object for a semiotic sign; but rather from its
denition derived from ANT, which more appropriately resembles the process by which an actor or actress in the performing
arts represents a character or a particular situation.
5
As coined by scholars enrolled in ANT as well as in Governmentality studies: i.e. Miller, P. and Rose, N (1990).
6
Evident, for example, in the proliferation of ‘codes’ and ‘standards’ whose purpose is to normalize the production of objects
and designs in elds as varied as ergonomics, biogenetics and even the musical instrument industry.
60
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
Law and Singleton (2005) arm that “we cannot understand objects
unless we also think of them as sets of present dynamics generated in,
and generative of, realities that are necessarily absent” (p. 343. Em-
phasis added). is means that, on one hand, making certain designs
emerge into presence makes it necessary, in turn, to make others simul-
taneously descend into absence; and on the other, that whatever emer-
ges as a new ‘reality’, breaks into the present through its very absence.
Hence, the sketches and models that end up being compiled in ‘project
logs’ at the end of each semester are judged as (evidence of) the design
‘process’. eir ultimate goal is therefore to act as reliable representative
spokesmen (Callon, 1986) capable of witnessing for the comprehensive
nature of the process that leads to the ‘nal design’.
Non-human agency in the design process
Up until this point , I have introduced three situations in which
‘non-human’ entities (such as models and sketches) play a leading role
in the assembly of three specic actor-networks. ese are:
1) In the creative process by which designers set out to ‘solve’ a
design problem through trial and error.
Image 2. Conceptual sketches for the ‘Anforas’ project in the 2012 Graduation Seminar in Arts and Visual Communica-
tions 2012. Each of the proposals aords
7
a universe of formal, discursive and pragmatical possibilities that are unique and
unrepeatable even for the same design team. e team’s selection of one of these expressive universes necessarily implies the
disappearance of all other alternative realities oered in the discarded proposals.
7
According to Harré (2002, p. 27) “e same material thing may have a great many dierent possible ways in which it can be
used. Each is an aordance. Aordances are spatio-temporally located relative to well-identied material things and states of
aairs.”
61
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
2) In the process by which a ‘nal design’ emerges as a ‘new
reality’, while any alternative enactment of reality is
consequently relegated to a mere hypothetical exploration.
3) Finally, in determining the ‘grade’ to be obtained by design
students at the end of each workshop.
From this point forward, I would like to focus the discussion on un-
derstanding the role these ‘non-human’ entities play in determining the
internal dynamics and the ‘nal’ result of any given design process. To
do so, I consider it necessary to introduce the concept of agency, as ori-
ginally coined in the neo-materialist tradition of post-human feminism,
and as widely developed further by ANT and STS scholars.
Even though the traditional concept of agency essentially refers to the
capacity of any entity to act, think and experience emotions (Callon,
2004), Callon and Muniesa (2005), following the analytical traditions
mentioned above, propose the concept of distributed agency to refer to
the capacity of ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ entities to act on equal terms.
Furthermore, these authors propose that all action is only possible
through the work of hybrid collectives, and not of ‘human’ entities
alone (p. 1236). In this work I argue that the design eld may oer one
of the spaces where this notion can be more clearly evidenced.
For instance, let’s take the less spectacular, everyday scenario that rst
comes to mind. A designer sits in her comfortable oce chair, sket-
ching (with a marker on sketching paper) ideas for a certain design
project. We may ask ourselves who is acting in this situation. Of course,
the most obvious and predictable answer would be the designer. But
is she acting alone? If this were so, then the design resulting from the
designer’s sketches would be nothing less than exactly what she rst en-
visioned in her mind, and thus what she ultimately materialized ‘as is’
on paper. But in this case, why did she produce as many as 80 dierent
sketches of the same thing during the process? And furthermore, how
can we explain that typically, designers don’t just ‘get it’ on the rst try?
Is it because the designer usually runs into the diculty of translating
the ideas in her head into images on paper, or rather is it that sketching
and doodling on paper allow the designer’s ideas to emerge?
62
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
If the laer is true, then the designer’s ability to materialize abstract
ideas in graphite on paper is mediated not only by their sketching
skills, but because of the possibilities, qualities and nishes that a
paper, pencil and the even the surface of the draing table (among
many, many other things) allow. Again, referring to the most mundane
scenario possible in the life of a designer; a pencil and a piece of sket-
ching paper will never allow the exact same design to emerge as could
materialize from the interaction between square-tip markers, fountain
pens and tracing paper, even if we speak of the same designer who
is sketching on the same draing table on the same day. As stated by
Callon (2004), ‘non-human’ entities (such as pens and tracing paper)
“[…] “take part in the process of production of knowledge and know-
how. Intellectual achievements, ideas, projects, plans, production of
information, are through and through material processes” (p. 7).
Image 3. Explorative sketches for the ‘Anforas’ project in the 2012 Graduation Seminar in Arts and Visual
Communications 2012. Note how the rst ten sketches by hand and pencil dier in gesture and expression
from the digital sketches in the lower right corner.
63
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
To develop this idea further, we can add the following thesis coined
by Latour and Yaneva (2008): “Drawing and modeling do not cons-
titute an immediate means of translation of the internal energies and
fantasies of the architect’s [or more generally, designer’s] mind’s eye,
or a process of transferring ideas from a designer’s mind into a physical
form […] Rather, the hundreds of models and drawings produced in
design form an artistically created primal maer that stimulates the
haptic imagination, astonishes its creators instead of subserviently
obeying them” (p. 84).
e conceptual, critical and paradigmatic approaches explored in this
paper may spark an interest in observing, researching and reecting on
the multiple ways in which we designers are actively and inseparably
linked to a constellation of ‘non-human’ entities every day. Moreo-
ver, the various yet intertwined discussions in the work also suggest
understanding our daily professional duties as the result of constant
heterogeneous negotiations between objects, skills, bodies, knowledge,
and guesswork. Following Wilkie and Michael (2015), I argue that
highlighting the complex, heterogeneous and synthetic character of de-
sign as an inventive method (Lury and Wakeford, 2012) or device would
allow us to understand it as a distinctive domain of practical expertise
“situated at an extreme because the elements that enter into its synthe-
tic processes are particularly heterogeneous. [Hence,] design studio[s,
workshops, and classrooms are] particularly ‘expansive’ version[s] of
centres of synthesis” (Wilkie and Michael, 2015, p. 39).
In short, I have explored how the analytical principles of ANT and STS
allow us to further understand the conditions through which designers
may be particularly sensitive to the complex and intimate negotiations
they perform using myriad materials and technologies with remarkable
agency; a capacity for action without which the emergence of design
objects, products or spaces would be inconceivable. Or as Yaneva
(2009) so prociently states it “such accounts of design reveal to what
extent designers are aached to nonhumans; [and how designers] can
hardly conceive a new object or environment without being assisted
and amplied by many drawings, tools, models and other devices”
(p. 283). e greatest challenge involved in joining a paradigm shi
that implies a generalized symmetry (Callon, 1986) of agencies between
‘human’ and ‘non-human’ entities is, according to Sarah Whatmore
64
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
(2006), “the onus [this places] on experimentation and, by implica-
tion, on taking (and being allowed to take) risks” (p.606).
Conclusions
is paper has sought to contribute to the growing body of research in
the design eld that, rather than looking at design objects and design
practices from the ‘outside’ (as would be, for instance, an ethnographical
or a historical study of how design ideas or inuences are transferred
from designer to designer), looks at designing—as a verb—from the
‘inside’; that is, in the performative negotiations between designers,
technologies and materials that occur daily in brainstorming sessions,
model building workbenches and university classrooms and workshops.
erefore, these pages ultimately intend to spark an interest in resear-
ching design—both as a eld and as an action—from an analytical
perspective capable of actually observing actors (both human and
non-human) as they act, and as they performatively assemble socio-te-
chnical hybrids (Bowker and Star, 1996) or actor-networks.
To support this interest and the arguments made in this paper, I have
referred to my own experience in university teaching in the design
eld, and to my own interest in critically inquiring about what Callon
and Latour (1981) refer to as the black boxes
8
that we as teachers pro-
duce and reproduce time and again without questioning their paradig-
matic, ideological, or contextual roots.
However, understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor–Ne-
twork should not be mistaken as an analytical solution to a multitude
of situated problems. Doing so would possibly lead to the forced reduc-
tion, normalization and ‘bracketing out’ of the complexity, instability,
and uniqueness of each individual situation. Instead, understanding
the heterogeneous and messy nature of our discipline may allow us to
‘open up’ a conversation on the limits of our prevalent research me-
thods and our analytical concepts and notions. e new discussions
generated in this context could, in the long run, constitute an intellec-
8
“A black box contains that which no longer needs to be considered, those things whose contents have become a maer of
indierence” (Callon and Latour, 1981, p. 285).
65
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
tual emancipatory force that would allow us to build knowledge from
the most mundane and less spectacular practices of our daily activities
that we take for granted and are oen even beliled, and not just from
certain abstract positions ‘borrowed’ from other disciplines such as
semiotics, psychology, or as Munari has it, exact sciences.
Aer all, the promise of engaging in an ontologically at design re-
search from the studio, the classroom or the workshop would involve
a “speculative obligation to those entities (users, collectives, commu-
nities, [and things]) who emerge by way of research practices” (Wilkie,
2016. p. 876. Emphasis added). Furthermore, doing so would also
allow us to restore the oen-overlooked thingness of design practices,
objects and skills which are necessarily “encoded in everyday and spe-
cialized technologies and assemblages in which agency is no longer the
sole privilege of human actors” (Lury and Wakeford, 2012, p. 9). at
said, I also believe that a messy understanding of the design eld may
present us scholars with the challenge (and the sensibilities) to build
a new design theory distanced from the generalized anthropocentric
conception that still prevails in our universities, rmly embedded not
just the way we produce academic knowledge, but also the way we
perceive and act in the world.
66
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
References List
Bowker, G. and Star, S. L., 1996. How things (actor-net)work: Classication, magic and the
ubiquity of standards. Philosophia tidsskri for loso, (25) 3-4, pp. 195-220.
Callon, M., 1986. Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the
scallops and the shermen of St Brieuc Bay. In: J. Law, ed. 1986. Power, action and belief:
a new sociology of knowledge? London: Routledge. pp. 196-223
Callon, M., 2004. e role of hybrid communities and socio-technical arrangements
in the participatory design. Journal of the Center for Information Studies, 5(3), 3-10.
Callon, M. and Latour, B., 1981. Unscrewing the big Leviathan: how actors
macro-sctructre reality and how sociologists help them do so. In: K. Knorr Cetina
and A.V. Cicourel, eds. Advances in Social eory and Methodology. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul. pp. 277-303.
Callon, M. and Muniesa, F., 2005. Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices.
Organization Studies, 26 (8), pp. 1229-1250.
Harré, R. 2001., Material Objects in Social Worlds. eory, Culture & Society, 19 (5-6),
pp. 23-33.
Kaltho, H., 2005. Practices of calculation: Economic representation and risk
management. eory, Culture & Society, 22(2), pp. 69-97.
Latour, B., 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B., 2008. A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design
(with Special Aention to Peter Sloterdijk). Keynote lecture for the Networks of Design
meeting of the Design History Society Falmouth, Cornwall, 3 of September, 2008.
Latour, B. and Yaneva, A., 2008. “Give me a gun and I will make all buildings move”:
An ANT’s view of architecture. In: R. Geiser, ed. 2008. Explorations in Architecture:
Teaching, Design, Research. Basel: Birkhäuser. pp. 80-89.
Law, J., 1992. Notes on the eory of the Actor-Network Ordering, strategy and
heterogeneity. Systems Practice, 5 (4), pp. 397-393.
Law, J., 2007. Actor Network eory and Material Semiotics. Version of 25th April 2007.
[Online] Available at: hp://www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2007ANTand-
MaterialSemiotics.pdf [Accessed 30 April 2021]
67
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
Law, J. and Singleton, V., 2005. Object Lessons. Organization, 12 (3), pp. 331-355.
Lury, C. and Wakeford, N., 2012. Inventive Methods: e Happening of the Social.
London: Routledge.
Miller, P. and Rose, N., 1990. Governing Economic Life. Economy and Society, 19(1), pp. 1-31.
Munari, B., 2004. ¿Como nacen los objetos? Barcelona: Gustavo Gilí, SA.
Runco, M. A., 2020. Divergent inking. In: M. A. Runco and S.R. Pritzker, eds.
Encyclopedia of Creativity. 3rd Edition. London: Academic Press. pp. 356-361.
Schön, D. A., 1983. e reective Practitioner: How Professionals think in action.
New York: Basic Books.
Timmermans, S. and Epstein, S., 2010. A World of Standards but not a Standard World:
Toward a Sociology of Standards and Standardization. Annual Review of Sociology, 36,
pp. 69–89.
Whatmore, S., 2006. Materialist returns: practicing cultural geography in and for a
more-than-human world. Cultural geographies, 13, pp. 600-609.
Wilkie, A., 2016. Introduction: Aesthetics, Cosmopolitics and Design. In: P. Lloyd
and E. Bohemia, eds. Proceedings of DRS2016: Design + Research + Society - Future-Focused
inking, 3, pp. 873-879.
Wilkie, A. and Michael, M., 2015. e Design Studio as a Centre of Synthesis. In: I. Farías
and A. Wilkie, eds. Studio Studies: Operations, Topologies & Displacements.
London; New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 25-39.
Yaneva, A., 2009. Border Crossing. Making the Social Hold: Towards an Actor-Network
eory of Design. Design and Culture, 1 (3), pp. 273-288.
Unpublished student projects:
Alfaro, M., Amador, G., Bonilla, J.L., Rodríguez, J.C., Tenorio, C., 2012. ‘Anforas’: Enclave
de Proyección y Encuentro Interdisciplinario. Escuela de Arte y Comunicación Visual,
CIDEA, Universidad Nacional, Heredia, Costa Rica.
Arrollo, G.M., Garrigues, D.R., Ramírez, A., Herrera, B., 2012. ‘Proyecto Intervención de
Plazoleta IP’. Escuela de Arte y Comunicación Visual, CIDEA, Universidad Nacional,
Heredia, Costa Rica.
68
Inmaterial 11_Artículo_ Understanding design as a messy socio-technical Actor-Network_Yamil Hasbun
Dr.phil. Yamil Hasbun has served as both a
researcher and a teacher at the School of Arts
and Visual Communications at the Uni-
versidad Nacional, Costa Rica since 2006;
particularly in the Environmental Design
study program from which he also graduated.
Yamil has a Ph.D. in Urban Design from the
Planning, Construction and the Environment
Faculty at the Technical University of Berlin,
Germany; and a Master’s Degree (M.Sc.Eng)
in Urban Design from Architecture & Design
at Aalborg University, Denmark. His research
interests revolve around the application of
material semiotics, Actor-Network theory and
Governmentality in the analysis of both design
‘practices’ and ‘objects’ as a performative so-
cio-technical hybrids.
