Bling & : Other Breaches in Design

Sammanfattning: The overall theme of this thesis is norm deviations, i.e. breaches, as an approach to illuminating blindspots in the design field in order to handle potential friction that arises constructively. The research presented consisted of two parts: the Bling? studies, which are part of the licentiate thesis, attached in Appendix 2, and the Breach! studies.The Bling? studies present how planned provocations in the form of norm violating experiments, i.e. breaching experiments, were used in a design education context to illuminate blindspots and reflect on and question established truths. Design students’ encounters with the Bling aesthetic resulted in their dismissal of it due to the design field’s underlying norms and values about good and bad taste and thus highlighted a blindspot in the relationship between good design and good taste. In the Breach! part of the studies breaching experiments were explored, and rather than these being staged artificially the focus was on identifying naturally occurring breaches in the design field. The aim was to understand how these are expressed, the motives that drive the people who perform the breaches, i.e. the breachers, and what these breaches reveal about the design field.Within the framework of the Breach! studies, a comparative interview study was conducted wherein designers in Sweden and New Zealand shared their experiences and reflections on their practice, what drives them, what challenges they face, how they handle these challenges, and how they see the future of their profession. A qualitative content analysis of the designers’ narratives employing breaches as an analytical filter showed, among other things, that to some extent the designers in New Zealand felt that they are isolated from the rest of the world in a professional sense as compared to their Swedish colleagues. At the same time, they feel less constrained by bureaucratic processes and more flexible to address challenges as in-betweeners and bricoleurs. Although Swedish design benefits from the widely known Scandinavian design brand, the responses of the designers in Sweden suggested that norms and values about what is right and wrong contribute to a more solid, less flexible discourse about what design is and could be, and there are tendencies towards a more monolithic context, contrasting with the more polylithic one in New Zealand.An additional Breach! study was conducted with the intention of comparing three designers who, in different ways, breach the prevalent norms of their context. Each of these breachers represents a niche of the design field – design practice, design education, and design research – with intention to exploring different types of breaches and breachers. Regardless of how successful they are in their breaches, their attempts have the potential to push the boundaries regarding which questions are possible to ask in different fields and go beyond these, so that they can expand – especially in normative contexts, or when consensus is high on the agenda.Breaches and breachers offer valuable opportunities not only for insights and introspection, e.g. in design education contexts, but for managing friction and building norm awareness, which is a prerequisite for both norm criticism and norm creativity – both of which are central aspects of the design field. Furthermore, the contribution of this work is relevant to the design field in terms of concretising and conceptualising some of the abstract dimensions of design as a practice and discipline, i.e. designers as in-betweeners/mellanförskapare and design as in-betweenness/mellanförskap. It highlights the importance of friction in design, and of both designers and the design field being able to handle it in a constructive way.