PhD defence L.A.G. (Laurens) Kolks

Below is a brief summary of the dissertation:

How does design enact the articulation of public issues?

People articulate their engagement with matters of collective concern in various distinct ways that go well beyond the practices and platforms favoured by institutional politics. Acknowledging that issues need to be actively constructed, and engagement with them dedicatedly sustained, this study describes how design can support material and action-oriented forms of political participation.

This dissertation depicts case studies in which specific design decisions forged meaningful new relationships between elements that were hitherto considered unrelated, in order to make the public issue of atmospheric pollution experientially accessible. Cases, moreover, that channel engagement with the issue of air pollution into the enactment of specific activities and the employment of particular artefacts. These curated combinations of artefacts and activities aimed to render this boundless, ephemeral, dynamic, and complex phenomenon sensible and facilitate alternative ways of knowing it.

Design can enact the articulation of public issues by supporting spaces of contest, exchange, and collaboration where frictions emerge at the interfaces of simultaneous, but very different, realities. Designers have roles to play in relating bodily, (ultra-)local, lived experiences to more abstract ways in which particular public issues are often described, represented and articulated.

By analysing artefacts as diverse as potassium iodide tablets, interactive digital maps, crockery, strawberry plants, “sniffing bikes,” and popsicles in the specific contexts they were put to use, this study explicates some of the mechanisms through which design can facilitate innovative, evocative, and meaningful ways to support the articulation of public issues.