Open Lecture: Participation, Practice, Publics and Process: Some thoughts on the mutuality of Design and Actor-Network Theory

Talk and seminar with Mike Michael. 

This presentation takes up a number of themes in Binder et al’s (2015) paper 'Democratic design experiments: between parliament and laboratory'. In particular it elaborates on the notion of cosmopolitics – especially as proposed by Isabelle Stengers – and the role it might play in participatory, and related, traditions of design. Specifically it raises the issue of how disparate practices from disparate groups (variants of experts and publics) might be 'brought together' in design processes, especially when that ‘bringing together’ is itself another (often expert) ‘practice’.

Conversely, it might be tentatively suggested that design is a discipline that is routinely engaged in the processes of practically ‘managing’ diverse practitioners and users, and as such might be a site where cosmopolitics finds particularly inventive expression.

Everyone is welcome!

About Mike Michael
Mike Michael is a sociologist of science and technology, and a Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. Recent interests have touched on the relation of everyday life to technoscience, and the use of design to develop a ‘speculative methodology’. Publications include (co-authored with Marsha Rosengarten) Innovation and Biomedicine: Ethics, Evidence and Expectation in HIV (Palgrave, 2013) and Actor-Network Theory: Trials, Trails and Translations (Sage, in press).