Tensions in Design

Script is a productive figure to inscribe and analyse gender and diversity in design. This paper addresses one risk of the use of script in our desire to design for gender and diversity. We locate our discussion of this risk in two design perspectives, ‘design from nowhere’ and ‘design from somewhere’. With the help of two vignettes we discuss how ‘design from nowhere’ was perceived as a perspective to de-gender-ise and de-culture-ise design. ‘Design from somewhere’, we argue, may result in a freezing of gender and identity in time and place. We propose a more open perspective, not yet ‘nowhere’ or ‘somewhere’, and we show how the notion of intra-action may be more productive in understanding how we keep the multiplicity of gender and diversity visible in the design process. We show this with an example of the object-oriented analysis and design practice. Lastly, we focus on the accountability of the designer, who, as a modest witness, has particular responsibilities in bridging partial knowledges and keeping those knowledges visible in the design process.