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‘FREE TRANSLATION’ AS A CRITICAL METHOD IN SOCIO-POLITICAL DESIGN ACTIONS
AUTHORS Mahmoud Keshavarz Malmö (Sweden)
Abstract
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Practice-based researchers in the design field usually adopt anthropological methods for ‘observing’ or ‘studying’ the field in order to come up with some ‘design solutions’ for a provocative co-designing of socio-political spaces. Usually such approaches move in the direction of legitimization of the ‘design knowledge’. What designers in socio-political action research do is an act of translation, which in various stages of the action gets different shapes (e.g. between their own knowledge and participants’ knowledge). Translation always tries to fill the cracks between an unknown space and a known one. Therefore translation becomes a functional and hierarchical bridge for those who do not know the origin’s language. But such a bridge has many cracks, which in a ‘good translation’ are not visible to readers but only to the translator. Therefore the translator, by hiding these cracks, never allows readers to engage in the work. However these cracks are fundamentally important for understanding the positioning and self-reflexivity occurring during the research. This paper draws a retrospective reflection upon the process of collaboration with women rights activists in Iran and Sweden. By adopting a new politics of translation called ‘free translation’ 5 , I argue that action research in the design field needs such a resituational method for formulating actions in other contexts, where the first language is not familiar with the second, third and so on. A free translation brings up questions of ‘qualification’, ‘power’ and ‘legitimization’ and opens a space for more engagement by intensifying the cracks in disciplines, knowledge and contexts. Free translation, sensory worlds, demystification of languages, conflictual space, emancipation
Mahmoud Keshavarz PhD Candidate, School of Arts and Communication, Malmö Univeristy, 205 06, Malmö, Sweden, +46(0)40-66 58694, mahmoud.keshavarz@mah.se
1. Introduction Today, design researchers adopt a mixture of research methodology to conduct research in social and political issues. More often doing research in socially and politically engaged design means you are involved with a ‘research through practice’ (Koskinen et al, 2011) or ‘participatory action research’. The issues that are discussed and addressed in such ways of doing research are complicated and complex on many various levels. One of the critical issues is the notion of ‘public’ and how the research practice makes new ‘publics’ to come. The other central issue is of course the notion of the ‘other’ in such projects. In academic discourse, also there is concern of how much such engagement would contribute to design and how much design contributes to expanding the notion of the political and social. These issues along with others and the demand of pragmatism in design discourse have created a blurry and confusing realm of theory and practice for design in social and political contexts where various ‘trends’ and categories for practicing and researching design have emerged. Therefore, a range of alternative formulations of design, often amended as ‘social’, ‘activist’, ‘critical’, ‘relational’, ‘humanitarian’, etc. design, are amassing an increasing number of examples, public exposure and theoretical depth (Mazé & Redström, 2009; Ericson & Mazé, 2011). Associated design practitioners often operate in the public sector, the academy, the cultural sphere and even the developing world – rather than adopting the more traditional or mainstream orientation of design as a ‘service profession’ to industry. This is not, however, a mere matter of replacing clients in the corporate sector for those in the public sector (cf. Julier, 2011; Mazé & Llorens, 2011) – public and societal actors operate in relation to a particular social complexity that market or industrial models do not address (Westley and Antadze, 2009). The ‘public’ is constituted by the widest range of people and groups with a right to speak and to be represented, and the public realm is characterized by uncertainties, contradictions and controversies (Latour & Weibel, 2005; Hinchcliffe & Whatmore,
R. Houlstan-Hasaerts, B. Tominc, M. Nikšič, B. Goličnik Marušić (Editors) Urbani izziv - publikacije, Ljubljana, May 2012