In a Wittgensteinian approach, the focus is not on the "correctness" of systems descriptions in design, on how well they mirror the desires in the mind of the users, or on how correctly they describe existing and future systems and their use. Systems descriptions are design artifacts. In a Wittgensteinian approach, the crucial question is how we use them, that is, what role they play in the design process.
The rejection of an emphasis on the "correctness" of descriptions is especially important. In this, we are advised by the author of perhaps the strongest arguments for a picture theory and the Cartesian approach to design--the young Wittgenstein in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1923). The reason for this rejection is the fundamental role of practical knowledge and creative rule following in language-games.
Nevertheless, we know that systems descriptions are useful in the language-game of design. The new orientation suggested in a Wittgensteinian approach is that we see such descriptions as a special kind of artifact that we use as "typical examples" or "paradigm cases." They are not models in the sense of Cartesian mirror images of reality (Nordenstam, 1984). In the language-game of design, we use these tools as reminders for our reflection on future computer applications and their use. By using such design artifacts, we bring earlier experiences to mind, and they bend our way of thinking of the past and the future. I think that this is why we should understand them as representations (Kaasboll, forthcoming). And this is how they inform our practice. If they are good design artifacts, they will support good moves within a specific design language-game.
The meaning of a design artifact is its use in a design language-game, not how it "mirrors reality." Its ability to support such use depends on the kinds of experience it evokes, its family resemblance to tools that the participants use in their everyday work activity. Therein lies a clue to why the breakthrough in the UTOPIA project was related to the use of prototypes and mockups. Since the design artifacts took the form of reminders or paradigm cases, they did not merely attempt to mirror a given or future practice linguistically. They could be experienced through the practical use of a prototype or mockup. This experience could be further reflected upon in the language-game of design, either in ordinary language or in an artificial one.
A good example from the UTOPIA project is an empty cardboard box with "desktop laser printer" written on the top. There is no functionality in this mockup. Still, it works very well in the design game of envisioning the future work of makeup staff. It reminded the participating typographers of the old "proof machine" they used to work with in lead technology. At the same time, it suggested that with the help of new technology, the old proof machine could be reinvented and enhanced.
This design language-game was played in 1982. At that time, desktop laser printers only existed in advanced research laboratories, and certainly typographers had never heard of them. To them, the idea of a cheap laser printer was "unreal ."
It was our responsibility as professional designers to be aware of such future possibilities and to suggest them to the users. It was also our role to suggest this technical and organizational solution in such a way that the users could experience and envision what it would mean in their practical work, before the investment of too much time, money, and development work. Hence, the design game with the mockup laser printer. The mockup made sense to all participants--users and designers (Ehn & Kyng, 1991).
This focus on nonlinguistic design artifacts is not a rejection of the importance of linguistic ones. Understood as triggers for our imagination rather than as mirror images of reality, they may well be our most wonderful human inventions. Linguistic design artifacts are very effective when they challenge us to tell stories that make sense to all participants.
Practical Understanding and
Propositional Knowledge
There are many actions in a language-game, not least in the use of prototypes and mockups, that cannot be explicitly described in a formal language. What is it that the users know, that is, what have they learned that they can express in action, but not state explicitly in language? Wittgenstein (1953) asks us to "compare knowing and saying: how many feet high Mont Blanc is--how the word 'game' is used--how a clarinet sounds. If you are surprised that one can know something you are perhaps thinking of a case like the first Certainly not of one of the third."
In the UTOPIA project, we were designing new computer applications to be used in typographical page makeup. The typographers could tell us the names of the different tools and materials that they use such as knife, page ground, body text, galley, logo, halftone, frame, and spread. They could also tell when, and perhaps in which order, they use specific tools and materials to place an article. For example, they could say, "First you pick up the body text with the knife and place it at the bottom of the designated area on the page ground. Then you adjust it to the galley line. When the body text fits you get the headline, if there is not a picture," and so forth. What 1, as designer, get to know from such an account is equivalent to knowing the height of Mont Blanc. What I get to know is very different from the practical understanding of really making up pages, just as knowing the height of Mont Blanc gives me very little of understanding the practical experience of climbing the mountain.
Knowledge of the first kind has been called propositional knowledge. It is what you have
"when you know that something is the case and when you also can describe what you know in so many words" (Nordenstam, 1985). Propositional knowledge is not necessarily more reflective than practical understanding. It might just be something that I have been told, but of which I have neither practical experience nor theoretical understanding.
The second case, corresponding to knowing how the word game is used, was more complicated for our typographers. How could they, for example, tell us the skill they possess in knowing how to handle the knife when making up the page in pasteup technology? This is their practical experience from the language-games of typographic design. To show it, they have to do it.
And how should they relate what counts as good layout, the complex interplay of presence and absence, light and dark, symmetry and asymmetry, uniformity and variety? Could they do it in any other way than by giving examples of good and bad layouts, examples that they have learned by participating in the games of typographical design? As in the case of knowing how a clarinet sounds, this is typically sensuous knowing by familiarity with earlier cases of how something is, sounds, smells, and so on.
Practical understanding--in the sense of practical experience from doing something and having sensuous experiences from earlier cases--defies formal description. If it were transformed into propositional knowledge, it would become something totally different.
It is hard to see how we as designers of computer systems for page makeup could manage to come up with useful designs without understanding how the knife is used or what counts as good layout. For this reason we had to have access to more than what can be stated as explicit propositional knowledge. We could only achieve this understanding by participating to some extent in the language-games of use of the typographical tools. Hence, participation applies not only to users participating in the language-game of design, but perhaps more importantly to designers participating in use. Some consequences of this position for organizing design language-games will be discussed in the following.
Rule Following and Tradition
Now, I turn to the paradox of rule-following behavior. As mentioned, many rules that we follow in practice can scarcely to be distinguished from the behavior in which we perform them. We do not know that we have followed a rule until we have done it. The most important rules we follow in skillful performance defy formalization, but we still understand them. As Michael Polanyi (1973), the philosopher of tacit knowledge, has put it: "It is pathetic to watch the endless efforts--equipped with microscopy and chemistry, with mathematics and electronics--to reproduce a single violin of the kind the half-literate Stradevarius turned out as a matter of routine more than 200 years ago." This is the traditional aspect of human rule-following behavior. Polanyi points out that what may be our most widely recognized, explicit, rule-based system--the practice of Common Law--also uses earlier examples as paradigm cases. Says Polanyi, "[Common Law] recognizes the principle of all traditionalism that practical wisdom is more truly embodied in action than expressed in the rules of action." According to Polanyi this is also true for science, no matter how rationalistic and explicit it claims to be: "While the articulate contents of science are successfully taught all over the world in hundreds of new universities, the unspecifiable art of scientific research has not yet penetrated to many of these." The art of scientific research defies complete formalization; it must be learned partly by examples from a master whose behavior the student trusts.
Involving skilled users in the design of new computer application when their old tools and working habits are redesigned is an excellent illustration of Polanyi's thesis. If activities that have been under such pressure for formalization as Law and Science are so dependent on practical experience and paradigm cases, why should we expect other social institutions that have been under less pressure of formalization to be less based on practical experience, paradigm cases, and tacit knowledge?
Rule Following and Transcendence
If design is rule-following behavior, is it also creative transcendence of traditional behavior. Again, this is what is typical of skillful human behavior, and is exactly what defies precise formalization. Through mastery of the rules comes the freedom to extend them. This creativity is based on the open-textured character of rule-following behavior. To begin with, we learn to follow a rule as a kind of dressage, but in the end we do it as creative activity (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986). Mastery of the rules puts us in a position to invent new ways of proceeding. As the Wittgenstein commentator Alan Janik has put it: "There is always and ineliminably the possibility that we can follow the rule in a wholly unforeseen way. This could not happen if we had to have an explicit rule to go on from the start . . . the possibility of radical innovation is, however, the logical limit of description. This is what tacit knowledge is all about" (Janik, 1988). This is why we need a strong focus on skill both in design and in the use of computer systems. We focus on existing skills, not at to inhibit creative transcendence, but as a necessary condition for it.
But what is the role of "new" external ideas and experiences in design? How are tradition and transcendence united in a Wittgensteinian approach? It could, I believe, mean utilizing something like Berthold Brecht's theatrical "alienation" effect Verfremdungseffekt to highlight transcendental untried possibilities in the everyday practice by presenting a well-known practice in a new light: "the aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity" (Wittgenstein, 1953). However, as Peter Winch (1958, p. 119) put it, in a Wittgensteinian approach: "the only legitimate use of such a Verfremdungseffekt is to draw attention to the familiar and obvious, not to show that it is dispensable from our understanding."
Design artifacts, linguistic or not, may in a Wittgensteinian approach certainly be used to break down traditional understanding, but they must make sense in the users' ordinary language-games. If the design tools are effective, it is because they help users and designers to see new aspects of an already well-known practice, not because they convey such new ideas. It is I think fair to say that this focus on traditional skill in interplay with design skill may be a hindrance to really revolutionary designs. The development of radically new designs might require leveraging other skills and involving other potential users. Few designs, however, are really revolutionary, and for normal everyday design situations, the participation of traditionally skilled users is critical to the quality of the resulting product.
The tension between tradition and transcendence is fundamental to design. There can be a focus on tradition or transcendence in the systems being created. Should a word processor be designed as an extension of the traditional typewriter or as something totally new? Another dimension is professional competence: Should one design for the "old" skills of typographers or should new knowledge replace those skills in future use? Or again, with the division of labor and cooperation: Should the new design support the traditional organization in a composing room or suggest new ways of cooperation between typographers and journalists? There is also the tension between tradition and transcendence in the goods or services to be produced using the new system: Should the design support the traditional graphical production or completely new services, such as desktop publishing?
Tradition and transcendence, that is the dialectical foundation of design.
Design by Doing: New "Rules of the Game"
What do we as designers have to do to qualify as participants in the language-games of the users? What do users have to learn to qualify as participants in the language-game of design? And what means can we develop in design to facilitate these learning processes?
If designers and users share the same form of life, it should be possible to overcome the gap between the different language-games. It should, at least in principle, be possible to develop the practice of design to the point where there is enough family resemblance between a specific language-game of the users and the language-games in which the designers of the computer application are intervening. A mediation should be possible.
But what are the conditions required to establish this mediation? For Wittgenstein, it would make no sense to ask this question outside a given form of life: "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him" (1953). In the arguments below, I have assumed that the conditions for a common form of life are possible to create, that the lions and sheep of industrial life, as discussed in the first part of this chapter, can live together. This is more a normative standpoint of how design ought to be, a democratic hope rather than a reflection on current political conditions.
To develop the competence required to participate in a language-game requires a lot of learning within that practice. But, in the beginning, all one can understand is what one has already understood in another language-game. If we understand anything at all, it is because of the family resemblance between the two language-games.
What kind of design tools could support this interplay between language-games? I think that what we in the UTOPIA project called design-by-doing methods--prototyping, mockups, and scenarios--are good candidates. Even joint visits to workplaces, especially ones similar to the ones being designed for, served as a kind of design tool through which designers and users bridged their language-games.
The language-games played in design-by-doing can be viewed both from the point of view of the users and of the designers. This kind of design becomes a language-game in which the users learn about possibilities and constraints of new computer tools that may become part of their ordinary language-games. The designers become the teachers that teach the users how to participate in this particular language-game of design. However, to set up these kind of language-games, the designers have to learn from the users.
However, paradoxical as it sounds, users and designers do not have to understand each other fully in playing language-games of design-by-doing together. Participation in a language-game of design and the use of design artifacts can make constructive but different sense to users and designers. Wittgenstein (1953) notes that "when children play at trains their game is connected with their knowledge of trains. It would nevertheless be possible for the children of a tribe unacquainted with trains to learn this game from others, and to play it without knowing that it was copied from anything. One might say that the game did not make the same sense as to us." As long as the language-game of design is not a nonsense activity to any participant but a shared activity for better understanding and good design, mutual understanding may be desired but not really required.
User Participation and Skill
The users can participate in the language-game of design because the application of the design artifacts gives their design activities a family resemblance with the language-games that they play in ordinary use situations. An example from the UTOPIA project is a typographer sitting at a mockup of a future workstation for page makeup, doing page makeup on the simulated future computer tool.
The family resemblance is only one aspect of the methods. Another aspect involves what can be expressed. In design-by-doing, the user is able to express both propositional knowledge and practical understanding. Not only could, for example, the typographer working at the mockup tell that the screen should be bigger to show a full page spread--something important in page makeup--he could also show what he meant by "cropping a picture" by actually doing it as he said it. It was thus possible for him to express his practical understanding, his sensuous knowledge by familiarity. He could, while working at the mockup, express the fact that when the system is designed one way he can get a good balanced page, but not when it is designed another way.
Designer Participation and Skill
For us as designers, it was possible to express both propositional knowledge and practical understanding about design and computer systems. Not only could we express propositional knowledge such as "design-by-doing design tools have many advantages as compared with traditional systems descriptions" or "bit-map displays bigger than 22 inches and with a resolution of more than 2000 x 2000 pixels are very expensive," but in the language-game of design-by-doing, we could also express practical understanding of technical constraints and possibilities by "implementing" them in the mockup, prototype, simulation, or experimental situation. Simulations of the user interface were also important in this language-game of design.
As designers, our practical understanding will mainly be expressed in the ability to construct specific language-games of design in such a way that the users can develop their understanding of future use by participating in design processes.
As mentioned above, there is a further important aspect of language-games: We make up the rules as we go along. A skilled designer should be able to assist in such transcendental rule-breaking activities. Perhaps, this is the artistic competence that a good designer needs.
To really learn the language-game of the use activity by fully participating in that language-game is, of course, an even more radical approached for the designer. Less radical but perhaps more practical would be for designers to concentrate design activity on just a few language-games of use, and for us to develop a practical understanding of useful specific language-games of design (Ehn & Kyng, 1987). Finally, there seems to be a new role for the designer as the one who sets the stage for a shared design language-game that makes sense to all participants.
Some Lessons on Design, Skill, and Participation
As in the first practice-oriented part of this paper on designing for democracy at work, I end this second philosophically oriented part on skill-based participatory design with some lessons for work-oriented design.
General lessons on work-oriented design include:
1. Understanding design as a process of creating new language-games that have family resemblance with the language-games of both users and designers gives us an orientation for doing work-oriented design through skill-based participation--a way of doing design that may help us transcend some of the limits of formalization. Setting up these design language-games is a new role for the designer.
2. Traditional "systems descriptions" are not sufficient in a skill-based participatory design approach. Design artifacts should not be seen primarily as means for creating true "pictures of reality," but as means to help users and designers discuss and experience current situations and envision future ones.
3. "Design-by-doing" design approaches such as the use of mockups and other prototyping design artifacts make it possible for ordinary users to use their practical skill when participating in the design process.