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Node Practice followed Conspicuous actors followed
Instruments used to collect data
Design Studio The design process Students, design collaboration tool, Web 2.0 tools
Questionnaire,
semi-structured interviews
Web 2.0 discussion places
Group formation Early stages of the design process
Students, design collaboration tool, Web 2.0 tools
Questionnaire,
online observation of Web 2.0 postings, post-
observation University
LAN (Wi-Fi)
Group formation The design process
Students, design collaboration tool, Web 2.0 tools
Questionnaire, activity log, observation schedule
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The main objective of the data analysis was to capture and understand the actors in the collaborative design network as well as the actions taken to tell the whole story (Latour, 2005).
This entails interpreting actors’ behaviour and how their roles were exposed and translated during their interaction in the collaborative design using Web 2.0 technologies. Since from ANT’s perspective practice is construed as an assemblage of socio-material actors in a network (Latour, 2005), analysis of the data therefore involved an assemblage of the trails traced. As explained in Chapter 1, the focus of the study was on the process of assembling heterogeneous actor networks rather than delineating and describing distinct entities.
The analytical framework is re-elaborated by Latour (1994a, p. 46):
In abandoning dualism, our intent is not to abandon the very distinct features of the various parts within the collective. What the new paradigm attends to are the moves by which any given collective extends its social fabric to other entities. First, there is translation, the means by which we inscribe in a different matter features of our social order; next, the crossover, which consists in the exchange of properties among nonhumans; third, the enrolment, by which a nonhuman is seduced, manipulated, or induced into the collective; fourth, the mobilisation of nonhumans inside the collective, which adds fresh unexpected resources, resulting in strange new hybrids; and, internally, displacement, the direction the collective takes once its shape, extent, and composition have been altered.
The analytical framework is therefore constituted by the following elements:
• Actors (actants/allies): These are defined by their relations; they are “network effects”
(Law 1999, p.5), and form the network in which the design is mobilised and the collaborative design process takes place. Networks become actors through the continuous work of stabilisation.
• Spokesperson: The person who is mobilising goals; speaking on behalf of the design;
stating a programme of action.
• Translation: The drift; the link between actors; what makes an actor what it is; how it emerges; and how it comes into existence.
• Enrolment: The processes and arguments that made the actors part of the network and support the design.
• Mobilisation: A series of actions that start with an interest and is generally considered to be consequential then translates the actors to adhere to the programme of action.
Actors (also referred to as actants or allies – both humans and non-humans) are associating because they are translating the aims and goals in something they recognise and accept. Actors
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have the same ontological dignity; there is perfect symmetry between humans and non-humans, and they can be elaborated on (unravelled) as themselves as comprising a network, or they can be black-boxed. Actors become stronger to the extent that they can firmly associate with other enrolled elements (Callon & Latour, 1981b).
There are two categories of actors, namely intermediaries and mediators. Intermediaries are actors that give form and consistency to the heterogeneous relations in the network. They have well-established input and output, such that if their input is defined it is enough to understand the output. Mediators, instead, convey information in the network and their input is not a good predictor of their output; as a result they need to be analysed in detail through their associations.
Mediators transform and translate the meaning they are supposed to carry, originating new translation, making the movement of and in the social visible to the researcher (Latour, 2005).
The main difference between an intermediary and mediator is not whether they have an identity, but rather if they act and thus have agency (Czarniawska & Mouritsen, 2009). During network formation allies (actors) make decisions, and these decisions contribute to setting up other allies or making them adversaries or sceptics (Akrich et al., 2002).
A spokesperson is an actor who is able to translate, speak, or act on behalf of other forces or actors, because he has persuaded the other actors after a chain of negotiations, intrigues, and calculations (Akrich et al., 2002). He/she is a translator representing the entities he/she constitutes (Callon, 1986c). A spokesperson becomes stronger when he/she can talk for and represent the actors mobilised and enrolled in his/her programme of action, but becomes weak if he/she has problems in the translations. Translation becomes disloyalty when an enrolled entity refuses to enter the actor world in order to expand into others. The destiny of most spokesmen is usually being viciously contradicted because entities are not easily translated (Callon, 1986c).
There are two types of spokespersons, objective and subjective. An objective spokesperson is the passage point and his/her ties persist despite the efforts of detractors. Thus, an objective spokesperson can speak on behalf of other actors, while a subjective spokesperson cannot speak in the name of other people but represents only him/herself (Akrich et al., 2002). An objective spokesperson is successful and speaks on behalf of others because he/she is entitled to make actions and decisions that will be crucial for the design process (Akrich et al., 2002).
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Translation builds an actor world from entities. It involves the definition of roles, and the delineation of a scenario. It attaches characteristics to actors and establishes more or less stable relationships between them. If a translation is successful, it leads to the mobilisation and enrolment of actors. However, a translation may be resisted (some elements may not be easily enrolled into a network of relation), so translation is a product (result or effect) as well as a process.
Mobilisation characterises the ordering of the various network elements, which gives the network its strength and durability. When actors are mobilised, it is not all network elements which are ‘active’, but they all contribute to the network’s durability because of the mutual relations they enter into (are ‘fixed’ into) through their mutual simplification and juxtaposition (Latour, 1987b). Enrolment is the process of getting the control of actors to participate in the construction of facts and to make their actions predictable (Latour, 1987b). If these processes are successfully accomplished, then the network is stabilised and there is support for the actors in the process. Because these concepts are connected, in the analysis they are described in the same paragraph (translations, mobilisations, enrolment).
Furthermore, ANT’s notion of the network enabled me to illuminate the associations formed among the actors. It was essential for me to examine and illuminate the associations established within the collaborative design network as these were critical in the shaping and reshaping of the collaborative design process. In a collaborative design actor network, these associations or ties are bound to affect actors as they translate their practice through the complex web of interconnections that they make. I traced associations to reveal the alliances, convergences and sometimes divergences or subversions encountered during the collaborative design process.
My illumination of the associations formed focused on the ways in which the network of relations was composed, how they emerged and how they were maintained, as well as how they were made durable over time (Latour, 2005). During the analysis I took due care to avoid privileging a particular type of constellation, giving particular attention to the thickest linkages made by the different actors in the mounting collection of data. This means that individual actors or humans did not necessarily stand in the centre of the analysis; sometimes inscriptions, important types of relations and technology did took centre stage.
I took due care to ensure that the data analysis upheld the three major methodological tenets of ANT: (1) the principle of agnosticism, which emphasises the impartiality of the researcher
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towards the human and non-human actors, (2) the principle of generalised symmetry, which concerns the researcher’s commitment to treating both human and non-human actors equally, and (3) the principle of free association, which avoids separation between humans and non- humans during the analysis (Callon, 1986c).
My scheme of analysis of data involved the following steps:
Identify as many (human and non-human) actors as possible, considering the fact that humans and technologies can be considered as actors (Research Question 1).
Investigating networks of associations and interactions through the moments of translation (Research Question 2).
Building up a general picture of the relationship between the various actors and how their interactions and relations/associations created and facilitated the collaborative design process (Research Question 1).
In a nutshell, I analysed the data to provide answers to the research questions, which sought to identify the major actors in the design network, and identify the roles these played in the assemblage of the design networks through the associations they created during the design process. My data analysis was two-pronged, involving assemblage of traced networks at a nodal level and (re)assemblage at a cross-nodal level. Below I elucidate how I followed this scheme to assemble and reassemble the collaborative design network that was enacted by the actors involved in the process.
The long journey to interpret data collected through interviews started off with transcription of the data to create some order, to enable an initial understanding or overview of the collected material. At this preliminary stage I made a decision as to what was relevant from how I understood the data. This was followed by a distillation process where I distilled the data I found to be relevant and discarded that which I did not find to be of any use. I did this to get a better overview of the collected data. The next and final stage of my analysis was the process of generating key themes.
To understand the data I turned to some of the central concepts of ANT to provide tools for coding and categorisation of data in the analysis. Therefore the codes and categories did not emerge from the data. My interest was to go through the data with an eye for relations, practices
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and translations that took place among the actors during the assemblage of the collaborative design network. I was also interested (as reflected in my first research question) in exploring the potential of the concept of ‘actor’ to include entities other than humans, hence the use of an all-embracing ‘actant’. In order to fully understand collaborative design as an actor network (see Chapter 2, Part B), a focus on controversies was an important point of entry to understanding how actors constructed solutions to the design problem they were working on. I did this to shed more light on the third research question of this study.
This analytical framework is summarised in Table 3 below.
Table 3: Summary of the analytical framework
Since the focus of this study was on assemblage of design networks, the process of coming up with themes was, as I stated above, guided by ANT’s moments of translation, which include the following phases:
• Actors
• Spokesperson
• Translation
Translation moments Design stage Analytical points/codes Problematisation Problem definition Primary actor
What is the problem?
Problem solution
OPP
Relevant actor Interessement
(convincing
Actors and getting actors committed)
Conceptual design Preliminary design
Who to convince
How to convince
How to isolate competing solutions
Enrolment (actors accept to be part of the network)
Detailed design Agreement on the exact role of the actor
Benefits that actors will afford
Mobilisation of allies (actors become
spokesperson; legitimacy of actors; network
stabilised)
Design communication Actor(s) become spokesperson(s)
The network is stabilised or not stabilised
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• Problematisation
• Enrolment
• Interessement
• Mobilisation.
Using the descriptors of these moments of translation, I was able to create codes that I used to identify themes around each of the four moments of the translation. I developed these codes from key words that the actors used across all data sources to trace and identify similarities, recurring patterns, and differences in what the actors said or did in the associations they formed with other actors at each stage of the design process, as expected in the module outline. I used these key words (codes) that the actors used to serve as descriptors for the moments of translation they experienced in the associations they formed at each stage of the design process.
The first thing the analysis had to do was to identify the problematisation stage of the translation moment through which the collaborative design network was brought into being and its OPP.
This was done through tracing the conspicuous actors of each of the design teams in terms of what they said and did which brought about or destroyed the actor network. By tracing what all the actor said or did I was able to identify and note all the actors including some inconspicuous actors that were networked and recruited into their practice (Latour, 2005). As mentioned earlier, the analysis revealed some inconspicuous actors which acted behind the scenes. These are the missing masses in most design researches, to use Latour (1992)’s term.
This fulfils the first of Latour’s requirements for understanding the network, namely identifying the actors within the network. In order to see how actors were interested into the collaborative design network, the analysis had to watch for information that could be used to understand how actors were enrolled and translated into the collaborative design actor network as it got to and subsequently traversed its OPP and moved toward stabilisation.
Secondly, the data collected at each node were analysed to identify and illuminate the role of each identified actor in the formation of the design network, and in so doing the second research question was answered. This was done to understand the actors within the network through identifying the traces they made/what they do/roles they play in a network. This entails identifying the activities of the actor network that are necessary for it to traverse its OPP. At the same time I needed to identify the spokespersons for each team and the action they performed to enrol other actors, and how they continued to sustain interessement, enrolment and mobilisation as the network moves toward stability or instability. Inscriptions are critical
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to the stabilisation and black-boxing of the network’s ideas. In designing, inscriptions include the sketches, working drawings and artefacts created during the design process.
Table 4, summarises some of the analytical questions I used to tease out meaning from the data collected.
Table 4: Summary of the analytical questions
Moment of
translation
Design activity Analytical questions asked
Problematisation Problem definition
Revised problem statement
Refined objectives
Constraints
User requirements
Functions Conceptual design
Model and analyse conceptual design
Test and evaluate conceptual design
1. What is the problem that needs to be solved?
2. Who are the relevant actors?
3. Who are the focal actor(s) that are representing the group of actors?
4. How does the focal actor(s) try to establish itself as an
obligatory passage point (OPP) between the other actors and the network?
Interessement Development of possible solutions
Clarify design objectives
Establish user requirements
Identify constraints
Establish functions Definition of working criteria/goals
Research and data gathering
1. How does the focal actor(s) get other actors interested?
2. How are the actors negotiating the terms of their involvement?
3. How are the roles of other actors defined?
4. How does the focal actor(s) work to convince other actors to take up their defined roles?
Enrolment Detailed design
Design solution specifications
Manufacturing specifications Testing and evaluation
1. Do actors accept the roles that have been defined for them during interessement?
Mobilisation of allies Design communication
Meetings
Presentations
Reports
Drawings
Document the completed design
1. Do the focus actor(s) in the network adequately represent the masses?
2. If so, enrolment becomes active support.
3. If not so then enrolment fails and there is discordance.
The final stage of my data analysis was the cross-nodal level analysis. At this stage data collated at the three nodes were (re)assembled. This involved the juxtaposing of data from the
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assemblage stage in order to answer to the third research question. My focus at this stage was on how the design network’s structure, stability, and durability were strengthened or weakened by the various associations created during the collaborative design process. This provided answers to the third research question, which sought to find out how students could use Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate the collaborative design process. The audio-taped interview transcripts traced the trajectory of the collaborative design process and relationships and the ties that students established with other actors in the network, such Web 2.0 technologies, design inscriptions, the university LAN. The transcripts also showed other actors which were enrolled into the network and the roles that were assigned to them by the focal actors. These data were also able to demonstrate how the enrolled actors impacted on the collaborative design process. Thus the data provided an empirical basis for discussing both the sociality and materiality of the collaborative design.