Design Research as Possibility

No Responses »
Oct 102011

The con­se­quences of this are legion. It means that pro­to­co­log­i­cal analy­sis must focus not on the sci­ences of mean­ing (representation/interpretation/reading), but rather on the sci­ences of pos­si­bil­ity (physics or logic)… (52)

This is from Alex Gal­loway’s Pro­to­col, which I’ve been reread­ing dur­ing the last few days. Galloway’s book is closely related to the project I’m cur­rently work­ing on. The pri­mary dif­fer­ence is that I’m focus­ing on the rela­tion­ship of pro­to­col and stan­dard­iza­tion to writ­ing and rhetoric whereas his argu­ment focused on pro­to­col and stan­dard­iza­tion through the lens of crit­i­cal social theory.

This pas­sage is sig­nif­i­cant in the way that it turns the inter­pre­tive method on its head. For Gal­loway, pro­to­co­log­i­cal (stan­dards) analy­sis explores pos­si­bil­ity rather than under­ly­ing mean­ing. This type of analy­sis explores pos­si­ble worlds that may not yet exist as a type of research, but are enabled through media, or in my favored ter­mi­nol­ogy: infrastructure.

Gal­loway calls this type of research hacking.

Before read­ing this, I’d formed an uncom­fort­able alliance with design study research, some­thing I’m not trained in, but found use­ful because of the its focus on pro­duc­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties rather than inter­pret­ing exist­ing texts. As I’ve worked on my own research, I’ve found it odd that rhetor­i­cal stud­ies hadn’t fre­quently taken the turn to pos­si­bil­i­ties and text pro­duc­tion more enthu­si­as­ti­cally. Rhetoric had his­tor­i­cally at one point been focused on cre­at­ing heuris­tics for pro­duc­ing new texts, not inter­pret­ing old ones. While a few rhetori­cians pur­sue that idea (Kaufer and Butler’s Rhetoric and the Arts of Design for exam­ple) and oth­ers have sug­gested that rhetor­i­cal analy­sis is pri­mar­ily a heuris­tic for pro­duc­tion rather than inter­pre­ta­tion (like in Dilip Gaonkar’s infa­mous attack on the rhetoric of sci­ence), research in rhetor­i­cal stud­ies in the mod­ern uni­ver­sity has largely remained a crit­i­cal act of inter­pre­ta­tion. I’m not sure why that is, per­haps there is more polit­i­cal power in the human­i­ties for being an inter­pre­tive dis­ci­pline rather than pro­duc­tive one. Any­way, I had taken to read­ing design schol­ar­ship because it embraces pro­duc­tion as research rather instead of the inter­pre­tive crit­i­cal approach.

Galloway’s work is moti­vat­ing because he takes the pro­duc­tive per­spec­tive from within media stud­ies, which is more closely aligned with rhetoric than design is, at least in North America.

Posted by NRJ at 6:59 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

What is a rhetorical perspective?

No Responses »
May 202011

Dur­ing my the­sis defense, a com­mit­tee mem­ber asked this ques­tion. I found myself stum­bling for an answer, not because I didn’t have one, but because I had too many. Dur­ing the defense, I answered by sug­gest­ing that a rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive was one indebted to the ever-changing inter­ests of pro­fes­sion­als who iden­tify as rhetori­cians. In my case, I’m most indebted to the dis­ci­pli­nary his­to­ries of rhetoric that emerge from the field of speech com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the United States.

I wasn’t happy with that answer, because it’s not pal­pa­ble enough. The idea is too abstract to be applic­a­ble dur­ing the hands-on work of a project. After my com­mit­tee member’s ques­tion, I real­ized that my own rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive had become back­grounded in order to focus on more elab­o­rate parts of research. Like the idea that Gadamer refers to as prej­u­dices, my rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive was some­thing I had stopped reflect­ing on.

Given that, I’ve been col­lect­ing var­i­ous def­i­n­i­tions from text­books, arti­cles, and con­fer­ence pro­ceed­ings, look­ing for one that I can rec­og­nize in my own work. I’ll be adding more as I find them. Some of these are more sophis­ti­cated than oth­ers, but they’ve all appeared in pub­li­ca­tion. Enjoy, and please add to the list in the com­ment section.

  • The shift towards a tran­scen­dent def­i­n­i­tion of rhetor­i­cal crit­i­cism is likely to be accom­pa­nied and rein­forced by a shift towards an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary con­cep­tion of the “rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive.… Sim­i­larly, as more inter­dis­ci­pli­nary links are fash­ioned, the encom­pass­ing con­cept of effec­tive­ness may increas­ingly func­tion as one of the dom­i­nant def­i­n­i­tional fea­tures employed to char­ac­ter­ize the rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive. (Brock, Scott, & Chese­bro, 1989, pg. 514)
  • The bias of a rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive is its empha­sis on and its con­cern with the resources avail­able in lan­guage and in peo­ple to make ideas clear and cogent, to bring con­cepts to life, to make them salient for peo­ple. A rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive is inter­ested in what influ­ences or per­suades peo­ple. (Camp­bell & Hux­man, 2003, pg. 2)
  • A rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive, then, focuses on social truths, that is, on the kinds of truths that are cre­ated and tested by peo­ple in groups and that influ­ence social and polit­i­cal deci­sions.… From its begin­nings, this empha­sis on social truths has been the dis­tinc­tive qual­ity of a rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive. (Camp­bell & Hux­man, 2003, pg. 2)
  • … to take a rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive means to assume that rhetoric itself is not good or bad, but instead is a vehi­cle that can be used for either (or both) of these pur­poses. (Cis­neros, McCau­liff, & Beasly, 2009, pg. 233)
  • This is the sec­ond premise of a rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive: that dis­course, lan­guage, and per­sua­sive sym­bols are influ­en­tial tools within a soci­ety. In short, rhetoric mat­ters. (Cis­neros, McCau­liff, & Beasly, 2009, pg. 234)
  • A rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive … calls atten­tion to the ways in which lan­guage use crys­tal­lizes rela­tions between read­ers and writ­ers. Such a per­spec­tive also brings into focus the extent to which the ways authors posi­tion them­selves within a cer­tain social space is con­tin­gent upon a.) author­ity … b.) the pur­poses that bring writ­ers together within a par­tic­u­lar social forum, and c.) the topic of their dis­course or task at hand. (Greene & Ack­er­man, 1995, pg. 383)
  • In the pub­lic under­stand­ing of sci­ence, rhetoric has two dis­tinct roles. It is both a the­ory capa­ble of analysing pub­lic under­stand­ing and an activ­ity capa­ble of cre­at­ing it. From the per­spec­tive of its first role, Aristotle’s Rhetoric is pri­mar­ily a trea­tise on pub­lic under­stand­ing; from the per­spec­tive of its sec­ond, it is pri­mar­ily a hand­book for speak­ers seek­ing to co-create pub­lic under­stand­ing. (Gross, 1994, pg. 5)
  • A rhetor­i­cal model of the pub­lic sphere would regard each of these engage­ments as part of the ensem­ble of dis­course that con­sti­tutes civil soci­ety, exam­in­ing each encounter as part of a social dia­logue on appro­pri­at­ing his­toric­ity. A rhetor­i­cal model reveals rather than con­ceals the emer­gence of publics as a process. (Hauser, 1999, pg. 49)
  • A rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive … draws on the rich rhetor­i­cal her­itage of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion that orig­i­nated with the writ­ings of ancient Greeks and Romans. (Heath, 2000, pg. 69)
  • Whereas a pub­lic spheres approach may end itself to reify­ing rigid boundaries—between inside and out­side, us and them, dom­i­nant and resistant—a pub­lic modal­i­ties per­spec­tive aims not only to fore­ground the flu­id­ity of iden­ti­ties across time and space, but also rec­og­nize how spe­cific con­texts of time and space con­sti­tute our iden­ti­ties .… A the­o­ret­i­cal approach that rec­og­nizes publics as processes must value stud­ies that reveal failed attempts at pub­lic­ity, block­ades to democ­racy, and mar­gin­al­ized sto­ries of cri­tique. (Pez­zullo & Depoe, 2010, pg. 103)
  • A rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive includes a vari­ety of method­olog­i­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal approaches .… a rhetor­i­cal approach … often shares the fol­low­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics … crit­ics focus on texts of writ­ten or spo­ken words. Nonethe­less, non­ver­bal forms of argu­ment are also being ana­lyzed by rhetorical/argumentation crit­ics .… rhetor­i­cal crit­ics are guided by the belief that our com­mu­nica­tive inter­ac­tions are epis­temic and inform most of what we come to know about the world. As a result, rhetoric/argument is impor­tant because it is both the how and what of socially-constructed real­ity. Rhetorical/argumentation analy­sis is thus also ide­o­log­i­cal analy­sis, since all under­stand­ings of the world serve par­tic­u­lar inter­ests. (Schi­appa, 2002, pg. 67)
  • A “rhetor­i­cal per­spec­tive increases our under­stand­ing about how dis­cur­sive lin­guis­tic sym­bols and non-discursive aes­thetic sym­bols func­tion together to com­mu­ni­cate and per­suade …” (Sell­now & Sell­now, 2001, pg. 395)
Posted by NRJ at 6:55 am Tagged with: , ,