Many Makings: Entangling Publics, Participation and Things in a Complex Collaborative Context

Empirical sociological and critical-reflective accounts of technology in action show how the design, development and use of interactive systems involves complex, changing configurations between participants, materials and the objects of design. Such observations make many rationalistic and normative accounts of design highly problematic (e.g. that design is essentially problem solving). Our work goes beyond such critical points and investigates practical strategies for managing complex projects that do justice to the entangled character of practice whilst enabling a high level of creative productivity. We report on a long-term collaboration between micro-businesses, artists, researchers, their institutions and their publics to create media, installations, performances, and participatory workshops. We document the range of design work that we were able to achieve and discuss a number of the challenges we encountered. We conclude by critically discussing several orientations to design research against our emerging image of design as "many makings".