Designing controversies and their publics

Design Issues

Volumn 31, Issue 3, 2015, Pages 74-87

  Venturini, Tommaso ^a   Ricci, Donato ^a   Mauri, Michele ^b   Kimbell, Lucy ^c,d   Meunier, Axel ^e,f  

^a SCIENCES PO   (France)

^b POLITECNICO DI MILANO   (Italy)

^c UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

^d UNIVERSITY OF BRIGHTON   (United Kingdom)

^e ÉCOLE DES HAUTES ÉTUDES EN SCIENCES SOCIALES   (France)

^f UNIVERSITÉ DE STRASBOURG   (France)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84938812655     PISSN: 07479360     EISSN: 15314790     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/DESI_a_00340     Document Type: Article

References (71)

1. Bruno Latour, “La cartographie des controverses,” Technology Review, N. 0: 82-83.
2. Albena Yaneva on architectural controversies at Manchester, Mapping Controversies in Architecture (Manches­ter: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2012). Other cities in which CM is taught include Paris, Copenhagen, Milan, Amsterdam, Liège, Lausanne, Padova, Trento, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro.
3. MACOSPOL (mapping­controversies.net)
4. MEDEA (projetmedea.hypotheses.org)
5. EMAPS (climaps.eu, emapsproject.com)
6. FORCCAST (forccast.hypotheses.org).
7. Yves Lacoste, La Géographie, Çà Sert, D’abord, À Faire La Guerre [Geogra­phy is First and Foremost at the Service of War] (Paris: La Decouverte, 1976).
8. All the beautiful images that illustrate this paper (except for Figures 3 to 8) have been designed by Daniele Guido.
9. Tommaso Venturini, “Diving in Magma: How to Explore Controversies with Actor-Network Theory,” Public Under­standing of Science 19, no. 3 (May 29, 2010): 258–73.
10. Tommaso Venturini, “Building on Faults: How to Represent Controversies with Digital Methods,” Public Understanding of Science 21, no. 7 (December 05, 2012): 796–812.
11. Jorge Luis Borges, On The Exac­titude in Science, but they may ignore an earlier version in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded(1893)
12. “Then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!” “Have you used it much?” I inquired. “It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”
13. EMAPS is financed by the “Sciences in Society” call for project of the 7th Frame­work Programme of the European Union.
14. Bruno Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design with Special Attention to Peter Sloter­dijk,” Conference of the Design History Society (UK: September 2008).
15. Following this lead, we made sure that the EMAPS consortium included partners with competences in communication design (DensityDesign Lab, Milan) and community design (The Young Founda­tion, London).
16. By “issue-expert” we mean all persons having a relevant experience of a given controversy. By definition, all actors engaged in a controversy are also experts of it.
17. See http://medialab.sciences-po.fr.
18. See https://www.digitalmethods.net.
19. See http://www.densitydesign.org.
20. Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927)
21. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry(Chicago, IL: Gateway Books, 1946).
22. Dewey 1946, 33, 137.
23. Far from being a mere juxtaposition of maps, good atlases allow their users to move through their charts. First used in 1595 as the title for a series of maps by Gerhard Mercator (Atlas, or Cosmographical Meditations upon the Creation of the Universe), the term “atlas” has known an increasing fortune and an immense array of applications. From history to politics, from arts to medicine, from astrology to psychology, the atlas is a systematic bind of repre­sentations relative to a specific but heterogeneous universe of objects.
24. Marco Quaggiotto, “A New Atlas for Abstract Spaces: Visual Tools for the Exploration of Complex Contexts,” in DRS2010 - Design & Complexity Proceedings, ed. David Durling et al. (Montreal, 2010).
25. Donato Ricci, “Seeing What They Are Saying: Diagrams for Socio-Technical Controversies,” in DRS2010 - Design & Complexity Proceedings, ed. David Durling et al. (Montreal, 2010).
26. Venturini, 2010.
27. Venturini, 2012.
28. In the following pages, we provide examples taken from the work done by one of our best groups of students on the hydraulic fracturing/fracking controversy (http://www.whatthefrack.eu/).
29. Chiara Andreossi, Massimo Guizzetti, Cristina Palamini, Giulia Peretti, and Silvia Recal­cati. Their extraordinary research report is available here: http://issuu.com/densi­tydesign/docs/whatthefrack/159?e=1199872/2100124.
30. Of course, as Umberto Eco noted, taxono­mies are always more complex than expected, and the branching of argu­ments resembles more to a rizhome than to a simple Porphyrian Tree.
31. Umberto Eco. Semiotica e filosofia del linguaggio. [Semiotics and the Philosophy of Lan­guage] (Torino: Einaudi, 1984), 58–64.
32. Recall that CM, descending from actor– network theory, has a very extensive definition of actors: scientists and engi­neers, of course, but also lay experts, activists, and decision makers, and not only individual actors but also collective actors (e.g., research institutions, enter­prises, lobbies) and non-human actors (e.g., instruments, theories, laws, natural elements)
33. Michel Callon, “Some ele­ments of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay” in John Law (ed.) Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge (1986), 196–233.
34. Bruno Latour, “On Recalling ANT” in Actor Network and After (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 15–25.
35. No matter how specific controversies might look from the outside, from the viewpoint of their actors, they are a war of words. Conversely, no matter how abstract the principles at stake are, controversies are always decided by the most specific and concrete arrangements.
36. Pelle Ehn, “Design Things: Drawing Things Together and Making Things Pub­lic.” TECNOSCIENZA 2, no. 1 (2011): 43-44. http://www.tecnoscienza.net/index.php/tsj/article/view/64.
37. To know more about the work done in EMAPS project on the Aging controversy see http://www.emapsproject.com/blog/ archives/category/ageing-controversies.
38. Ehn, 2011: 46.
39. Pelle Ehn, Work-Oriented Design of Com­puter Artifacts (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1988).
40. John W. Tukey, Exploratory Data Analysis (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1977) interactive data visualizations have been recently proposed for less specialized users
41. Zachary Pousman, John Stasko, and Michael Mateas, “Casual Information Visualization: Depictions of Data in Every­day Life,” IEEE Transactions on Visualiza­tion and Computer Graphics13, no. 6 (2007).
42. At least four areas of visualization for non-experts have been developed: 1 Ambient visualization
43. Zachary Pousman and John Stasko, A Taxonomy of Ambient Information Systems, Proceedings of the Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces - AVI ’06 (New York, NY: ACM Press, 2006)
44. Social visualization; 3 Artistic visualization
45. Fernanda B. Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, “Artistic Data Visualization: Beyond Visual Analytics,” (July 22, 2007), 182–91; http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1784297.1784319
46. Robert Kosara, Visualiza­tion Criticism - The Missing Link Between Information Visualization and Art, 2007 11th International Conference Informa­tion Visualization (IV ’07) (IEEE, 2007); and 4 Persuasive visualization
47. B. J. Fogg, “Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do,” Ubiquity (December 2002).
48. One of the best examples of such a strat­egy has been developed by Bostock and Carter to represent a classic political con­troversy: the U.S. presidential election. The interactive visualization published by the New York Times is remarkable in that it allows the reader to understand the weight of each swing state by simulating different combinations of results. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/ 11/02/us/politics/paths-to-the-white-house.html (accessed October 25, 2014)
49. Jeffrey Heer and Ben Shneiderman, “Interactive Dynamics for Visual Analysis,” Queue 10, no. 2 (February 01, 2012): 30.
50. This movement is well synthetized in the mantra, “overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand.”
51. Ben Shneider­man, “The Eyes Have It: A Task by Data Type Taxonomy for Information Visualiza­tions,” Proceedings of the IEEE Sympo­sium on Visual Languages (1996).
52. F. Van Ham and A. Perer, “‘Search, Show Context, Expand on Demand’ Supporting Large Graph Exploration with Degree of Interest,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 15, no. 6 (2009): 953–60.
53. Bruno Latour, “The ‘Pédofil’ of Boa Vista: A Photo-Philosophical Montage,” Com­mon Knowledge 4, no. 1 (1995): 144–87.
54. The possibility of exploring back the validity of a scientific argument becomes more and more prominent now that scientific publications are increasingly migrating to online availability. The decreasing cost of digital publishing now makes possible and even requires that scientists publish their code and data, along with the paper presenting the results extracted from them.
55. Darrel C, Leslie Hatton, and John Graham-Cumming, “The Case for Open Computer Programs,” Nature 482, no. 7386 (February 23, 2012): 485–88.
56. Bruno Latour, Pablo Jensen, Tommaso Venturini, Sébastian Grauwin, and Domi­nique Boullier, “‘The Whole Is Always Smaller than Its Parts’: A Digital Test of Gabriel Tardes’ Monads,” The British Journal of Sociology 63, no. 4 (December 2012): 590–615.
57. Outstanding examples of the narration-exploration circle exist in the domain of video games (Murray, 1997), and interest­ing experiments are in progress with web documentaries (e.g., localore.net or web­docu.fr), but little has yet been done in the domain of scientific communication
58. Edward Segel and Jeffrey Heer, “Narra­tive Visualization: Telling Stories with Data,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 16, no. 6 (Janu­ary 2010): 1139–48.
59. T. Kim & C. DiSalvo, Speculative Visual­ization: A New Rhetoric for Communicat­ing Public Concerns, Proceedings of Design Research Society (DRS) Interna­tional Conference Design & Complexity (Monreal, 2010).
60. Lipmann (1927)
61. Katz, Elihu, and Paul Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1955).
62. Dewey 1946.
63. Noortje Marres, No Issue, No Public: Democratic Deficits after the Displace­ment of Politics (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam: 2005).
64. Phd by Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis.
65. In this sense, controversy mapping is not so different from conventional mapping, which has always had a profound effect on geographic territories. Far from being mere representations, maps have always been used to envision how the territories had to be ruled and transformed—for example, when tracing the route of a new road to be built or a new border to be defended
66. Franco Farinelli, Geografia: Un’introduzione Ai Modelli Del Mondo [Geography: An Introduction to Models of the World] (Torino: Einaudi, 2003).
67. J. W. Crampton and John Krygier, “An Introduction to Critical Cartography,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 4, no. 1 (2005).
68. In this sense, our EMAPS project repre­sents a tangible example of the efforts to couple the ideas of John Dewey and the activities of design imagined by
69. Carl DiSalvo, “Design and the Construction of Publics,” Design Issues 25, no. 1 (January 2009): 48–63.
70. The progressive approach described here resembles closely the “agile” approach to software development, where drawing detailed and complete specifications is considered less important than prototyp­ing and interacting with the users accord­ing to the slogan, “release early, release often!”
71. Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2001).