DESIGN PRACTICE AS A DISCURSIVE AND INTERROGATING PERFORMANCE

This PhD is focused on how design can play a role in engaging people in potential serious issues, or producing forms of knowledge that are still unstable, or controversial. The research is based on a series of hands-on explorations in the sense that I design and evaluate a set of discursive concepts that in different ways aim to mediate and visualise those issues. This paper presents the status of two different research projects in relation to my current key areas of research where I employ my skills within interaction and product design in a co-design research environment. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND Technology plays an important role in fulfilling societal functions and change; its functions depend on a relationship with other elements. Berkhout (Berkhout, 2004 et al.) suggests a way to understand how to construct change is through analyzing the qualities of our socio-technical constructions. To do this, I will make use of Actor Network Theory (ANT), which is a distinctive approach to social theory that originated in the field of science studies. ANT will be used as a framework and systematic way to consider the infrastructure surrounding technological achievements. It integrates human and non-human actors into the same conceptual framework and assigns equal amounts of agency to both (Latour, 2005). Accordingly, and in relation to my research, it is a move away from trying to attribute behavioural change to a set of externalised factors. To be able to change our patterns of consumption, we need to acknowledge that institutions, infrastructures and daily life is an ongoing negotiation where individual behaviour is located as an outcome of socio-technical change, not as external drivers of i