To present the analysis I chose the narrative form, since it allows me to describe facts not simply as such but always as matters of concern, with their mode of assembly and their stabilising mechanisms clearly visible (Latour, 2005). ANT narrative is more than a simple explanation or description. Coming up with such a narrative is therefore not a simple matter, but involves the redrawing or negotiating of the boundaries between the researcher and the collected data. Latour (1997) sees it as both an analytical as well as a practical undertaking of de-scripting of facts that are matters of concern. As I have mentioned earlier on, the analysis is focused on identifying both the conspicuous and inconspicuous actors during the Web 2.0-
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facilitated collaborative design process and demonstrating how the process is carried out through understanding the traces left by the actors during their translations.
To begin with, I identify the actors that were enrolled and translated into the collaborative design actor network at all three of the nodes identified in this study, namely the design studio, the university LAN and the Web 2.0 working spaces. This fulfils ANT’s first requirement for understanding a network, namely identifying the actors within it (Latour, 2005). Although ANT scholars differentiate between actors and actants, in this study the term ‘actor’ was used to refer to all the elements that took part or exerted their agency on other elements during the collaborative design process. I took this position mainly because, although in ANT the term
‘actants’ refers to both human and non-human participants in the network, in many ANT reports this term is used to refer mostly to non-human elements (Shiga, 2006). The fundamental thing is that actors in ANT terms are semiotic entities constituting reality; they act in a space, assembling and constantly creating society (Latour, 2010). They are concrete and real entities, with a defined, full set of features, and are capable of forming solid relations and alliances as they interact in an actor network. However, actors only become real as they become embedded in relationships. These relationships illuminate the identities of the actors. An actor is characterised by its action capacity and its autonomy in decision-making. What is important, at least for me, is to note that whether they are human or non-human. Actors in a network are influenced by their relations with others in the network, and have equal ability and agency in their interactions. In this study, an actor was expected to act within the activities which constitute the collaborative design process, and keep up relations with other actors involved in the design project.
The next requirement of ANT was to understand the actors within the network by identifying the ‘work they trace’ that is what they do in the network. I did this by first identifying the activities of the actor network that were necessary for actors to traverse the OPP at each stage of the collaborative design project. This involved taking note of the agency of things.
According to ANT agency is only made visible in accounts as doing or transforming something.
Any actor, human or non-human, will not be able to act if it has not taken position in a bigger configuration that also acts together (Geels, 2005). If it is not possible to make an account of an agency, then an actor is not doing anything and is therefore not an actor in the process.
Furthermore, the focus on agency required me to recognise that what made actors do things can have different kinds of figurations (Latour, 2005). In actual fact, one figuration could have
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different agencies, as well as one agency possibly having different figurations. I used this tactic to identify actors in order to trace the work they did during the collaborative design project.
This approach is a shift from the usual approach of observing static objects such as design object, as this approach focuses on those things that can accommodate the means by which actors manifest their agency (Potts, 2009). However, I found it ambiguous from Latours’
description as to who should make the different agencies visible – hether it is the actors being studied or the researcher. My interpretation was that it was my ability to account for an agency that should decide if there was an agency or not. As Potts (2009, p. 287) suggests:
Knowing who is participating, where they are participating, what systems are supporting them, and what they are doing can help us understand the interaction dynamics that support the creation of this information network.
However, the task of accounting for the actions of non-human actors was not an easy one.
Latour (2005), suggests that one way of doing this is by tracing their mediation roles. In addition to the role of making connections, mediation is a concept that draws attention to the organising effects of non-human actors in the design process. As such, viewing Web 2.0 technologies as mediators highlights their role of assembling, and their ability to hold relations in place, and to modify relations to achieve the desired objectives of the actors. In order to explore the actors’ role as mediators, Latour (2005) suggests that we engage in empirical metaphysics. Empirical metaphysics entails that we take the actors’ own accounts of what they are doing or their ‘theories of action’ as our starting point in presenting our findings (Latour, 2005, pp. 47, 51). I achieved this by keeping my vocabulary as researcher as minimal as possible and by reporting actors’ agencies according to accounts, figurations, and controversies as put forward or portrayed by the actors themselves, since an account can have many other forms than spoken language (Latour, 2005, p. 53). As noted, this was not easy because Latour himself was very elusive on who should make the different agency visible. However, as I indicated earlier on, the responsibility of the map created in this project lies on my shoulders as creator. As such, it was my ability to account for an agency that decided if there was an agency or not.
A distinction should be made between mediators and intermediaries, and Latour (2005, p. 39) points out that “Mediators transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry”, while an intermediary “is what transports meaning or force without transformation: defining its inputs is enough to define its outputs”. In other words, an intermediary is anything that circulates between actors and helps define the relation between
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them. In this study the notion of intermediary covers diverse and heterogeneous materials such as design sketches, working drawings and texts, among other things that we used during the design process. Intermediaries are the visible effects of the work of assembling heterogeneous materials performed by any actor that seeks to impose its own version of reality on others. They represent the actor in two ways: by standing for them and acting on behalf of them.
Based on the analytical framework discussed in section 3.3, the analysis proceeds as follows:
For each node the actors are identified, paying particular attention to what they actually do or actions they take. The role played by an actor in the collaborative design process traces every action made according to the role attributed at the beginning. Furthermore, the analysis illuminates the relationships that the actors or allies established during the translation process as they created a collaborative design actor network in the collaborative design process. Using ANT it was possible to visualise the network created by the various actors from each node, which interact by exchanging information about the design project, tracing and connecting mediators. I used the moments of translation to illuminate how the collaborative design process was enacted in practice. In addition, I also examined the association network formed at each node of the collaborative design process paying particular attention to their evolution, how they restructured themselves as well as whether traversed and infiltrated the other nodes or not.
I observed that mapping out connections among the actors was not at all straightforward.
Nevertheless, ANT and its rich vocabulary allowed me to illuminate the ties or associations formed among the heterogonous actors enrolled into the collaborative design project. As Feldman and Pentland (2008) state, I had to focus on performances that resulted in associations or connections that were created between the actors with a view to account for the ostensive aspects of the various sets of associations created. I also had to follow the actors to explain how these associations were stabilised or changed through the strengthening or weakening of the associations respectively. Examination of these associations is important because it is through these associations that the identities and roles of the actors are shaped and reshaped as the activity of the network progresses (Singh-Pillay, 2010). It is in fact these associations which translate actors’ practice in a complex web of interconnections, such as in collaborative design.
During analysis of the data these associations or ties needed to be examined closely to see how their strengthening or weakening would impact the collaborative design process.
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