Illusory essences

Reference: Brick, C., et al. (2020). Illusory essences: A bias holding back theorizing in psychological science.

Abstract: The reliance in psychology on verbal definitions means that psychological research is unusually moored to how humans think and communicate about categories. Psychological concepts (e.g., intelligence; attention) are easily assumed to represent objective, definable categories with an underlying essence. Like the 'vital forces' previously thought to animate life, these assumed essences can create an illusion of understanding. We describe a pervasive tendency across psychological science to assume that essences explain phenomena by synthesizing a wide range of research lines from cognitive, clinical, and biological psychology and neuroscience. Labeling a complex phenomenon can appear as theoretical progress before sufficient evidence that the described category has a definable essence or known boundary conditions. Category labels can further undermine progress by masking contingent and contextual relationships and obscuring the need to specify mechanisms. Finally, we highlight examples of promising methods that circumvent the lure of essences and we suggest four concrete strategies to identify and avoid essentialist intuitions in theory development.

My notes: An excellent pre-print that tackles a key problem across science and one that seriously affects many areas of design research, including cognitive studies of 'fixation' and 'ideation' and, of course, neurological studies aiming to discover "the essence of design activity". Worth a careful read. These days I usually only scan papers and would only read the section I'm most interested in (methods, literature, findings, or discussion). I enjoyed going through this paper slowly and absorbing its content, especially the well-framed challenges and questions to think about how we conduct and interpret research.

The non-participatory patient (or plurality in participation?)

Reference: Sanin, J. (2020). The non-participatory patient. In ServDes.2020 – Tensions, Paradoxes, Plurality. RMIT University, Melbourne Australia. 411-421

Abstract: This paper discusses tensions and paradoxes of codesign paradigms and calls for more plural approaches to participation in order to establish collaborations with non-participatory users. It builds on research experiences in the field of design for wellbeing to challenge assumptions about user participation and introduce the concept of ‘the non-participatory patient’. This conceptual figure is used to represent those users who do not engage with codesign activities, or those who engage, but contribute in ways that contradict expectations of designers and industry partners. It is argued that most service design projects are not able to account for the needs and preferences of non-participatory users, who are most of the time excluded from design processes and outcomes for being considered as disengaged or disobedient. These experiences make evident the need for collaborative tools, techniques and formats beyond those traditionally used in codesign, and able to bring more plurality into service design.

My notes: An advantage from the Covid-19 pandemic is conferences moving online. Organisers are still figuring out how to run online conferences. In 2020, most conferences kept charging very high registration fees and basically hid their content behind paywalls and youtube unlisted videos. We can only hope that moving forward, conference organisers will see the new opportunities of online conferences. Imagine, for example, charging a $10 fee to get the proceedings, live webinars, and a thematic catalogue of pre-recorded presentations. I can imagine hundreds perhaps thousands of students, academics and professional designers joining these events. 

Anyway, moving on to Juan Sanin's ServDes2020 paper, like many other papers of this conference I found it refreshing and insightful. Juan questions some of the most pervasive assumptions behind participatory design calling for adopting the word in plural "participations" to think in more sophisticated and ethical ways about who participates, why, and how.