Things are actors too

Simon has linked to a couple of papers on materiality in social research that he has written [in partnership with Simon Blyth of Unilever] that are well worth reading.  Most stuff around Actor Network Theory [ANT] doesn’t seem that helpful to the average researcher doing research, in fact most Social Science ‘theory’ seems elitist and irrelevant to me.  But whilst ANT and particularly Bruno Latour’s  work is [in my opinion] probably the best thing to happen to Social Science in the last fifty years it hasn’t made a huge impact in terms of telling stories about the world to inform better design.  Simon’s papers’ are of the few I’ve seen that try to make materiality matter to a wider audience.  Why? 

Well, I think we tend to anthropomorphisise materiality and / or consign non-human things to the status of second class citizens.  This is mostly as a result of the belief in ‘agency’ residing only with ‘us’ when actually the ability to have effects resides in everything, but only as a result of a coming together with other ‘things’, what ANT is all about; networks of association.  And being drilled in a humanist reading of life that’s hard to take.  We like to think of ourselves as special :)  

That said many of the people writing around design and experience design in particular seem to be influenced by "materiality".  Terms like ‘affordance’ seem to spring up in conversations I have with people in design, so there seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that it’s important.   But in terms of doing the background to inform design it’s tough to know where to start.  My old superviser once said to me – when I was struggling to get to grips with how to research materiality – that ANT was basically about being as granular in ethnographic work as possible and not taking anything as a given.  That helped.   

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