Q&A With Robert O'Toole

How do you describe yourself?

A philosopher and teacher working at the interface between technology, cognition, culture, design and education.

Do you have a title for your thesis?

A working title: Makers, designers, artists, producers and managers in the higher education craft collective.

What kinds of questions are you asking people?

• What do you make? (documents, tools, knowledge, facts, questions, answers, events, the social, subjectivity, objectivity etc).
• From what materials? Using what tools? Where? With whom?
• Do your materials "speak" to you? Have an independence and agency of their own?
• What role does chance play? Do you deliberately open yourself to chance?
• How are your creations mediated, remediated, translated, transmitted, preserved?
• Do you worry about this?
• Who do you make things for?
• How do you know you are making the right things, in the right way, of the right quality?
• Do you consciously expose your creations to challenge? How? Do you think about risk? Do you actively manage risk?
• What is problematic, contentious in this making?
• Do you worry about this?
• What values do you try to embody in your creations?
• Do you identify yourself with one of the common personae from art, craft, design and manufacturing?
• Are your creations "designed"? How?

What difference will your research make?

How can we become better at participatory social innovations, designs and constructions? How can we be more actively involved in creating our futures, rather than being passive consumers or voters? How can this be achieved in a sustainable, durable, ethical way? Education is a big part of the answer. In education we learn how to make things, how to know what to make, how to appreciate manufactured things and how to contend the design of things that are made. Various creative personae are explored and adopted (craftworker, designer, artist, manager, thinker etc). My research will give a clearer understanding of the kinds of educational practices and institutions that can develop this active involvement. It will document practices already present within a leading higher education institution (the University of Warwick, especially in the humanities). It will consider how they may be developed and extended within higher education and beyond (for example, with implications for the design of schools), using techniques from the design industry (IDEO, design thinking). It will describe how we can "reassemble" the university to become a better maker of makers.

What is your philosophical starting point?

From pragmatist philosophy: that culture, value, and judgement are produced in a complex feedback loop between context-sensitive vibrant matter, deterritorializing patterns of abstraction, and synthesizing human agency of various forms (through which we reflexively conceive of ourselves). Abstraction is powerful but dangerous, degrading vibrant matter and human agency. This happens when abstraction is allowed to seem natural, pre-existing, beyond critique and design. We can't reject abstraction, we can't ever escape from it, but we can bring it back down to earth, making it an object of design. From design thinkers and practitioners: that there are ways in which vibrant matter, abstraction and human agency can be designed to work together, sustainably and co-operatively.

What is your big idea?

Society and subjectivity are not naturally pre-existing forms, but rather are co-assembled and constantly maintained, as assemblages of matter, abstraction and agency (Guattari, 1995; Latour, 2007). Design theorists have described working in such contention-rich and dynamic conditions as working with "wicked problems" (Buchanan, 1992). The attitudes and techniques that commonly develop in response to "wicked problems" are termed "designerly" (Lawson, 2005). Education isn't merely the place in which the young are trained in the skills necessary for this construction work. Neither is it just the place in which they are de-skilled and disempowered so as to conform to a single axiomatic. It can be, and sometimes is, the location of sophisticated design and construction activities - the kind of construction with designerly reflexivity described by Donald Schön in Educating the Reflective Practitioner (Schön, 1990). This is particularly common in the humanities, a domain full of "wicked problems". I argue that, as a consequence, those working (researching, studying, writing) in the humanities may develop a "designerliness" appropriate to the "wicked problems" that they pose. This makes the humanities a particularly rich breeding ground for social innovators and innovations.

What is your plan?

Starting with the already well-developed work of design theorists, sociologists and others I will clarify and exemplify the concepts of "wicked problem", "assemblage", "double articulation", "construction", "social innovation", "manufacturing", "craft", "collectivity", "design" and "designerliness".

Through interviews and surveys I will trace the construction work done by students and others, the contentions that develop, and the strategies employed in response - looking for "wicked problems" and "designerly" responses. What gets built in this "craft collective"? What is the material of academic construction? How do academics work with (and love) the "vibrancy" they find in it? How does the collective nature of this construction pose questions of design and demand a designerly response (through contention)? How are people co-constructed, designed in these activities? What then do they take away from the local and temporary constructions to make use of elsewhere?

Which books and articles are you using?

Bennett, Jane Vibrant Matter: a Political Economy of Things

Bilton, Chris Management and Creativity

Buchanan, Richard "Wicked Problems in Design Thinking" in Design Issues, Vol. VIII, Number 2, Spring 1992.

Clark, Andy Being There: Putting Brain Body and World Together Again

Davidson, Cathy Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work and Learn

De Landa, Manuel A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity, 2006.

Deleuze, Gilles Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (trans. Massumi) A Thousand Plateaus, 1988.

Docherty, Thomas, For the University: Democracy and the Future of the Institution, Bloomsbury, 2011.

Facer, Keri Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change

Greatrix, Paul Dangerous Medicine: Problems With Assuring Quality and Standards in UK Higher Education, 2005.

Guattari, Felix Chaosmosis: an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, 1995.

Kelley, Tom The Ten Faces of Innovation

Latour, Bruno Reassembling the Social: an Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

Lawson, Bryan How Designers Think

O'Toole, Robert "Contagium Vivum Philosophia: Schizophrenic Philosophy, Viral Empiricism and Deleuze" in Deleuze and Philosophy, the Difference Engineer, Ansell-Pearson, Routledge, 1996.

Schön, Donald Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions

Sennett, Richard Together: the Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-operation