03 - Participation - Transformation of The Aesthetic Art As Participatory Design

Design and Culture
The Journal of the Design Studies Forum
ISSN: 1754-7075 (Print) 1754-7083 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfdc20
Transformation of the Aesthetic: Art as

Participatory Design
Matthew Holt
To cite this article: Matthew Holt (2015) Transformation of the Aesthetic: Art as Participatory
Design, Design and Culture, 7:2, 143-165, DOI: 10.1080/17547075.2015.1051781
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Transformation of the
Aesthetic: Art as
Participatory Design
Matthew Holt
Dr Matthew Holt is Program Manager ABSTRACT This paper argues that the most sig-
DOI: 10.1080/17547075.2015.1051781
of Design and Architecture at the
University of Technology Sydney’s
nificant, contemporary synthesis of art and design
pathway program, Insearch. He has a is occurring at the level of participatory projects,
Ph.D. from The University of Sydney, and not in the more customary fields of collusion
and has published and taught
extensively in the fields of design and
(product design, for example). These projects are
art history. He is also a practicing durational, experiential, and dialogic, and there-
graphic designer and his first volume fore I argue that traditional aesthetics based on
of short stories has recently been
published by Puncher & Wattmann.
the contemplation of objects and the analysis of
matthew.holt@insearch.edu.au representations does not adequately account for
what amounts to an aesthetics of co-creation. To
examine this transformation this paper surveys
participatory art and design projects in a number
of different fields and also some of the key critical
Design and Culture
literature around the aesthetics of collaboration

and dialog. Finally it argues that art in the form of
participatory design offers a political alternative to
both the avant-garde tactic of adversarial “shock”
and the notion of presenting a voice or an opinion
in a neutral public sphere; rather it can be seen to
modify – design – that sphere itself.
143
M. Holt
KEYWORDS: participatory design, participatory art, “designart,”

relational aesthetics, dialogical aesthetics
Introduction
Naturally there has been a long history of connection between
art and design, and artists in particular have moved comfortably
between the two spheres. In terms of the principles of classical
aesthetics, however, design has been routinely associated with the
mundane and the mercantile (and more critically with “kitsch”) rather
than with the creative autonomy ostensibly enjoyed by the fine arts.
More recently there has been an attempt to take a more favorable
and nuanced approach to this relation in the critical literature. For
example, Alex Coles has used the somewhat awkward term “des-
ignart” to refer to the long history of interaction between the two
fields and in particular the interest in the 1990s in what he calls “art’s
romance with design” (2005: 8). Coles believes the origin of this form
of art is the constant migration across the border between art and
design beginning in the nineteenth century with the Arts and Crafts
movement, the writings of John Ruskin and Oscar Wilde, and then
onto modernism proper, especially Henri Matisse. From the side of
design, to Coles’ list we can also add the design workshops, move-
ments, and schools which shared a common desire both to explore
and transform the apparatuses and products of mass production
through aesthetic means and values such as, in no particular order,
the Vienna Secession, the Wiener Werkstätte, the Russian Con-
structivists, the Bauhaus, and so on.
The appellation “designart” is employed by Coles to refer to
artists as diverse as Liam Gillick, Josep van Lieshout, Experimen-
tal Jetset, Jorge Pardo, Takashi Murakami, Tobias Rehberger,
Superflex, and Andrea Zittel. And though with the inclusion of Pardo,
Gillick, and to some extent Zittel in this list we find ourselves in similar
territory to that of “relational aesthetics” (Bourriaud 2002), which
emphasizes the social and event-bound forms of aesthetic expe-
rience (also Rirkrit Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno, Carsten Höller, inter
alia), Coles follows a very traditional division of design into pattern,
furniture, interiors, and architecture when explicating the hybrid
forms of designart and therefore does not include the participatory
aspect of that fusion. Not to do so is problematic because it elides
important developments in design itself. That development can be
described as the shift from the production of a discrete object, or
144 Design and Culture
of an aesthetic applied to a range of objects, to design as the cre-

ation of experience, as an aesthetic activity itself (Redström 2007).1
Similarly it sidesteps the non-object-based traditions of modern
and contemporary art that can be classified as “participatory.” One
of Coles’ own examples, Superflex, a group of Danish artists, is a
case in point. Their 1999 work Tenantspin is an excellent instance of
user- or community-centered, socially engaged art (indeed it is one
Transformation of the Aesthetic: Art as Participatory Design
of the examples that opens Claire Bishop’s book on participatory

art, 2012). It began life in Copenhagen, where the group helped train
local communities to produce noncommercial and interactive tele-
vision programs on the Internet, a project that soon developed and
expanded, most notably taken up by predominately elderly hous-
ing estate tenants in Liverpool. The participants write, produce, and
then host the shows (Bradley 2001). The emphasis Superflex places
on training in concert with the user and with the efficacy of their cre-
ations situates them equally within the scope of participatory design
(PD) as participatory art, and indeed it is at the level of participation,
rather than furniture, that the most interesting and vibrant hybrid of
art and design is currently formed, which in turn, I will argue, calls for
a reconsideration of how we conceptualize design aesthetics.
Compared with traditional, industrial-based design, or the
enduring presence of architecture and urban design, the aesthetic
dimension of PD has not been examined in any great detail. This
is understandable in the sense that PD is conducted through net-
works rather than hard manufacture and is user-centered and col-
laborative, and more concerned with “up-skilling” its participants
than being commercially focused on the production of objects. It
is therefore often ephemeral in nature and scope, much harder to
identify in terms of shape, form, and presence than a product or
even a service. In the case of industrial design, the aesthetic is pri-
marily the look and feel (the “skin”) of the designed object, which has
been conceived under the aesthetic categories of decoration, orna-
ment, beauty, or more broadly that of styling and branding.2 Indeed a
recent book, Jane Forsey’s The Aesthetics of Design (2013), argues
that the categories under which we understand art and works of art
– and the attendant values of harmony and beauty, etc. – can jus-
tifiably be applied to the designed object in order to include design
in “philosophical aesthetics” (2). But how would an aesthetics of
participation be understood? Aesthetic experience which is active,
communal, and co-created is much more difficult to reconcile in a
philosophical tradition based on the subjective contemplation of a
largely inert object. As such, co-created aesthetics has struggled
to find its own concepts and be accorded its own theoretical loca-
tion. Forsey’s book and the tradition in which it is situated does not
encompass the dramatic widening of the scope of design following
the continued transformation of Western economies into postin-
dustrialism – design is now interactive and participatory, based in
services and systems as much as manufacture, and coincides with
Design and Culture
the often immaterial nature of information and communication. It is

therefore not a matter of whether we can include the supposedly
prosaic, everyday design object into the framework of traditional
aesthetics but how to explain the aesthetics of active, co-created
phenomena.
By focusing on PD,3 this paper will argue that the passage from
145
object-based design to PD has led to – or at least created the

M. Holt
conditions for – a new hybrid of art and design substantially differ-

ent from previous models of collaboration and intersection between
the two domains (a transformation of the aesthetic). Here I do not
claim to identify a new “movement” to which all participants are
self-consciously attached. Rather I intend to delineate the shape of
an emerging trend: many artists, as we shall see, no longer draw
a rigorous distinction between their art and user-centered design,
including more politicized versions of it (e.g. “adversarial design”;
DiSalvo 2012). And designers, for their part, are incorporating an
expanded sense of aesthetics – especially an aesthetics of partic-
ipation often inspired by performance-based, durational, and what
Grant Kester calls “dialogical” art (2004) – into their research and
work. With the help of this delineation and overview, and after draw-
ing attention to possible reasons why there is a lack of definition
of participatory, relational aesthetics (except negatively: as a kind
of “anti-aesthetics”), I hope to provide some ideas about what an
aesthetics of co-creation may look like; and, finally, I will examine
aspects of the political dimension of that aesthetics. But first a
historical overview and definition of PD, especially as it intersects
or at least shares a common sociopolitical stratum, as it were, with
participatory art.
Participatory Design, Participatory Art

It is generally accepted that PD – at least as a self-conscious phe-
nomenon – has its origins in the Scandinavian experiments in “work-
place democracy” in the 1970s, specifically centered around the
early use of workplace computing and information systems (Ehn
1988; Greenbaum and Kyng 1991; Greenbaum and Loi 2012). This
strong relation to technology continues today, especially in terms of
the social technologies of Web 2.0 (Hagan and Robertson 2012),
but also increasingly so in forms of participatory art, for example, the
Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, for whom the cooperative use of
software is central to her practice.
The designer Hilary Cottam (2010) has nominated “participatory
systems” as a truly twenty-first-century phenomenon, but the Scan-
dinavian emphasis on workers having a say in the design and use of
their work environments coincided with a dramatic and widespread
exploration of autonomous modes of action in the late 1960s and
into the 1970s, intimately linked to a rethinking of democracy in
terms of participation against what was perceived as the stultifying,
bureaucratic nature of institutionalized forms of public life and rep-

resentation. Sherry R. Arnstein’s famous article, “A Ladder of Citizen
Participation” (1969), is an excellent summary of those emergent
trends – the more direct participation in running one’s own affairs,
the more democratic: her “ladder” or scaling runs from nonparticipa-
tion (manipulation), through tokenism to citizen control. Design, too,
was radicalized along these lines with many organizations, design-

ers, and design theorists aiming for either antagonistic modes of
design and/or citizen-based designing. In the former case, we could
include the Italian movements of the 1960s, Archizoom, Superstu-
dio, Global Tools, etc., and in the latter, community involvement in
urban planning and redevelopment (Sanoff 1978; Simonsen and
Robertson 2013: introduction). In the related field of educational
practice and theory, Paolo Freire’s critical pedagogy (1996) ques-
tioned the “banking” model of knowledge – the depositing, so to
speak, of information into students – and instead encouraged equal-
ity between educator and student, or at least education as a mode
of dialogic co-participation.
As both Bishop and Kester (2004, 2011) show, this impulse
towards citizen control (or involvement) is very much the heart of
participatory art of the same period, in particular in the form of the
community arts movement, which, despite rich diversity, aimed to
“give shape to the creativity of all sectors of society, but especially
to people living in areas of social, cultural and financial deprivation”
(Bishop 2012: 177). Both authors also stress the democratic nature
of such art projects, and the emphasis on (often very long-term)
process, rather than finished products or “results.”
The basic definition of PD is that it involves people in the design
process who have a stake in the outcome of the design from the very
beginning, rather than being an end-user or a temporary source of
feedback in the development stage. As such this correlates directly
with Bishop’s definition of participatory art: “in which people consti-
tute the central artistic medium and material, in the manner of thea-
tre and performance” (2). The aim of PD in all its forms is to address
as far as possible the complete “life-world” of the user (for an over-
view, see Sanders and Stappers 2008: 10–11), to break down the
fourth wall of design, as it were. Whether one finds the origin of
PD in user-experience design, human-computer interface research
and software development, or in community-based social action,
PD in any of its forms is first and foremost user-centered and user-
generated information sharing and negotiation (for an overview of
all the strands of PD, see Simonsen and Robertson 2013: intro-
duction). It encourages collaboration at all points and stages of the
design process. Unlike user-centered design in its broadest sense,
which starts with an understanding of user needs but does not
necessarily involve the user throughout the whole design process
or leave the design in the hands of the user, for PD the latter is
Design and Culture
absolutely essential – the community of users are the designers. PD

therefore tends to foster a sense of public responsibility rather than
private gain and so always involves a political element.
In emphasizing the co-determination of the design between
designer and stakeholder Henry Sanoff thus believes the roots of
PD lie in the ideals of a participatory democracy where collective
147
M. Holt
decision-making is highly decentralized throughout all sectors of

society, so that all individuals learn participatory skills and can effec-
tively participate in various ways in the making of all decisions which
affect them. (2007: 213) (See also Lee 2008 on “design participa-
tion”.) In concert with this political dimension, Sanoff emphasizes as
features of PD the user’s “tacit knowledge,” notions of “collective
intelligence,” the expert knowledge of the stakeholder rather than
solely that of the technician, control of content, the innovation and
creativity resulting from active engagement, and finally the element
of trust and consensus on an organizational level (213–14).
In the same vein, Manzini and Rizzo define PD as “a constella-
tion of design initiatives aiming at the construction of socio-material
assemblies for and with the participants in the projects” (2011: 201,
their emphasis). The notion of “socio-material assemblies” brings PD
into the ambit of what may be defined as the “turn to practice” in
contemporary thought (for an overview, see Reckwitz 2002). Essen-
tially this means social activity is considered as an ongoing set of
regularized and active habits rather than embodiments of a back-
ground force – for instance, of an ideology, a cultural “spirit,” or an
identity – that exists prior to that practice or that may be read off that
practice.4 As it is user-focused, PD can be understood as a way of
creating new practices, rather than as an instantiation of a design
concept or idea.
As such, and perhaps above all, PD is emphatically opposed to
the idea of “pre-designing” – the imposition of the already designed
upon a situation or upon a community of use. PD does not preempt
what the use of the design will be. In other words, it is a way of mak-
ing an argument to reverse the flow of information and thereby – to
some extent – the power from producer to user.
What is not discussed in the literature of PD is that the arrange-
ment and organization – let alone the experience – of those
“socio-material assemblies” imply an aesthetic dimension, as all
collective action does, whether from the perspective of taste and
distinction in the process of segmentation and self-definition, or in
giving form to group dynamics itself (respectively: Bourdieu 1984;
and Canetti 1962). But an aesthetics of participation is quite different
from these more standard and indeed top-down ideas of collectivity,
and so, at least initially, we must turn to participatory art to analyze
the aesthetic dimension appropriate to PD.
Participatory Art, Participatory Design

Relatively recently, for example, an exhibition at the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Sydney, “In the Balance: Art for a Changing
World” (2010), was replete with a diverse range of design projects
that engaged with various communities in a cooperative manner,
deploying both user-centered research and user-generated content
common to PD.
Figure 1
Jeanne van Heeswijk et al., “2Up2Down/Homebaked” design process, 2011.
The Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk’s project, “Talking Trash

– personal Relationships with Waste,” began with research based
on extensive interviews with volunteers, primarily from the regional
town of Goulburn where much of Sydney’s waste is deposited, but
also from Sydney itself. The interviewees provided information and
self-reflection on the way they did or did not address questions of
waste. From this – and an investigation into landfill practices – the
research generated a number of artworks, including the narrative
fragments gleaned from the interviews enacted for the camera as
short pieces of “reality fiction.” Earlier, as part of the 2009 Liverpool
Biennale, van Heeswijk was invited to work on a community hous-
ing project at Anfield (the project would become known as “2Up
2Down”; Figures 1 and 2). A decade or so before, some 4000 ter-
race homes in the area were emptied and slated for redevelopment.
The scheme never got off the ground and the area in turn became a
typical testament to failed commercial aspirations of “housing mar-
ket renewal.” Van Heeswijk worked with locals to revive a small site
in the area to embrace a number of uses, including restoring a for-
mer bakery so that it is now community organized and community
serviced. This site functioned as a “lab,” a place for discussion, but
Design and Culture
also for planning (education) – a site removed from the demands of

commercial integration and left open to user groups.
This idea of a “lab” where the community-based designing could
take place was also an essential feature of her project “Face Your
World” in the Amsterdam district of Slotervaart, which lasted from
2005 to 2011, involving local young people in a project of urban
149
renewal (http://www.faceyourworld.net). The project was intentionally

M. Holt
Figure 2
Jeanne van Heeswijk et al., “2Up2Down/Homebaked” design process, 2012.
and predominately aimed at the youth of the area of Slotervaart, the

brief being to design a neighborhood park around the theme of an
“active green” reflecting and engaging the multicultural composition
of the district. Young people of the area worked together with a spe-
cially provided computer-aided design (CAD)-like software program,
“Interactor,” which allowed them to come up with design ideas and
drop them into a computer-generated image of the park both to test
and share those ideas. Over time, the plans consolidated and were
decided upon and the park and its environs built. More recently van
Heeswijk has worked on “The Great Unpacking of Associative Life”
(2011), a project tracing the connections between various cultural
and political associations in the Saint-Michel neighborhood in Bor-
deaux in order to bring about sustained reflection – and celebration
– of important local networks by the participants themselves (http://
www.jeanneworks.net).
Another piece from “In the Balance” belonged to young S ydney
artist-designers Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe, entitled “Gwago
Patabágun ___ We Will Eat Presently” (2010), a mobile food cart/
beehive. “Piece” is perhaps the wrong description. It was part of a
series of events; it delivered food, ran itself to a degree with a solar
panel, and functioned as a sculpture when parked in front of the

Museum of Contemporary Art. It sought to engage in local indig-
enous and colonial histories, especially as they intersected on the
issue of food and food supply. In itself, such a project is not radically
new, but it derives from a pair making little or no distinction between
studio, lab, workshop, research, and education (http://www.make-
shift.com.au). Previous projects of Zettel and Khoe include an indoor
market garden at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (again in

Sydney), in which the products of the garden were made available
to staff and other participants, and an experimental food-preserv-
ing kitchen at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (“Making Time,”
2010). “Making Time,” once more exploring the intersection between
design, art, and food, was an exchange with the local community
over recipes, preserving techniques, and their own design values.
“In the Balance” also included the San Francisco-based
Futurefarmers collective, who are devoted to bringing sustain-
able, small-scale farming techniques to urban situations; Lucas
Ilhein’s environmental audit of the exhibition itself, which incorpo-
rated visitor impact analysis expressed as information visualiza-
tions; Lyndal Jones’ retrofitting and rebuilding of older properties;
Lauren Berkowitz’s “Manna 2009,” an installation of medicinal and
edible plants grown by volunteers; Diego Bonetto’s ongoing hybrid
practice, which includes education, tours, web-based research, and
display; and Joni Taylor’s nomadic, micro-architectural projects (for
the catalog of the exhibition, see Kent et al. 2010). All these cre-
ated aesthetic experiences alongside enduring, useful practices,
intersecting but not confined to the museum or gallery space.
Though the artists may have kick-started the projects and made
the key aesthetic decisions on how to present them, their true goal
was to generate transformative research in concert with the “stake-
holders” themselves. This is not representation but collusion. Hence
the works of Makeshift and others in the exhibition emphasized the
political basis of their projects – they are communal, concrete, and
engaged – rather than the institutional interface or even the actual
issue of environmentalism, in the sense that it is not a matter of
expressing or representing an idea of the “environment” but of form-
ing assemblages enacting and thereby modifying environmental,
political, and economic concerns. It is transformative activity not
“consciousness-raising.” Additionally, it is not simply a question of
making things more human (and therefore, by default, less techno-
logically rational) or responding to perceived “human needs.” Rather,
the designer-artist can also participate, as it were, with non-human
agents, the most obvious being elements of the environment itself
– soil, plants, water, etc. – but also with its associated technologies
of greenhouses, chemicals, fertilization, “foodways,” genetic modi-
fication, and so on. The environment, then, is itself a user. It is not a
theme to be explored, an idea to be given material, aesthetic form,
but itself an active participant in an ongoing practice. The aim of
Design and Culture
the exhibitors was not to challenge audience perceptions of either

works of art or the institutions that present them, but to produce and
participate in what might be called “re-directive practice” (Fry 2009).
These projects clearly belong at some level to the participatory art
tradition, the genealogy of which Bishop traces to modernist avant-
garde practices challenging passive modes of spectatorship through
151
performance and provocation, via the social, community arts projects

M. Holt
of the 1960s and 1970s to the project-based art we have already

touched on. Certainly much participatory art attempts to collapse
the fourth wall in order to integrate art and life and shift aesthetic
experience from the consumption of an image to a socially engaged
practice (see, for example, her discussion of the Situationists,
2012: ch. 3), and as Bishop marks out on numerous occasions par-
ticipatory art has always grounded itself in a certain understanding of
democratic practice. But in the contemporary merging of the activ-
ities of artists and designers at the level of participation there is less
an outright attempt to be antagonistic in the institutional realm of
the gallery and the kinds of spectatorship encouraged by it – as we
have seen with the example of “In the Balance” – than in producing
ongoing, efficacious designs (including designs of systems). In other
words, the goal of participatory art is closer to the normative domain
of design, that of efficacy, but an adaptive and ongoing efficacy in
particular, rather than avant-gardist “shock” (Kester 2004: 82–3
provides a good overview of the latter form of aesthetic experience –
disruption and shock – and the kind of authority it has claimed over
“dialogical” art; we will return to these questions in the conclusion).
1. Exhibition and Environment Design

The type of design-art hybrid I am arguing is becoming more and
more predominant is also expressed not just in what is displayed in
galleries but in exhibition design itself. Exhibition design of all kinds
has been absorbing the lessons of collaborative, research-based
designing (Heath et al. 2001; Black 2005). This amplified approach
to exhibition design has its origins not only in the modernist exper-
iments of the Bauhaus, Russian Constructivism, and, in particular,
the influence of Herbert Bayer in the United States, but also in the
total experiences created by Norman Bel Geddes and the experi-
mental practices of the Eames, who consistently deployed a vast
array of display techniques and approaches, including photography,
film, the time-line/history-wall, a mix of personal and global stories,
events, installations, and, importantly, interactive exhibits (Kirkham
1995). But what has been introduced more recently is twofold: an
increased awareness of audience participation in the co-creation of
meaning, and the realization that exhibitions are not so much (or not
only) overviews but exercises or laboratories in speculative modes of
interaction (Muller et al. 2006).
No doubt speculation has always been explicit in the world of
product exhibitions – new products of the future have ever been

the dominant theme of industrial design exhibitions. The difference
today, however, is that the speculative dimension is defined not as
an inevitable march of technological solutions but a human-cen-
tered place of experimentation and even technological rebuttal –
designing out things can be just as important as introducing the
latest product, machine, or lifestyle. Most importantly in terms of
new museum design is the shift from displaying knowledge about

a subject to the subject representing itself (Hein 2000; Message
2006; and for the concept of new museology, see Vergo 1989). Evi-
dently this is at its most potent in a traditionally anthropological or
ethnographic context or when expressing a continuous culture – the
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewain, Wellington, is an
exceptional example, as is the National Museum of the American
Indian in Washington, DC.
2. Art, Science, and Participation: Tactical Design

Artist-designers exploring the extent, capacity, and effects of science
and technology, such as Natalie Jeremijenko, also often have partic-
ipatory and/or co-design methodologies at the basis of their work.
The work she showed at the University of Technology Sydney gallery
in 2010 (and linked to a conference on PD, see Muller 2011), entitled
“X,” was an exposition of her “environmental health clinic” at New
York University, which, among other things, attempted a redefinition
of health from the dominant paradigm of a technical monitoring of
the private, individual body to awareness of its social and ecological
nature, reversing often cynical “customer-focused” techniques into
potential action. Her previous work includes an open-source robotic
project; a catalog of strategies, tactics, and devices designed for
direct political action; alternatives to the design of the zoo (“Ooz”),
which emphasized animal experience and their own capacities to
communicate (rather than being mere objects of the zoological gaze;
Fuller 2010); and forms of what she dubs “amphibious” architecture
(http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign), all of which again transgress
and expand what is exactly meant by a “user.” Her work, further-
more, is not just the provision of models for alternative living – or
what Bourriaud calls “sociability” (2002: 33) – in the sense of redefin-
ing the borders between extant art practices (installation, sculpture,
performance, etc.) and those of everyday life. Rather, she proceeds
from an already accepted premise of interdisciplinarity (bioscience,
design, art, etc.) and therefore not from the “private symbolic space”
(Bourriaud 2002: 13) which constitutes the more traditional, individ-
ual arts. We could call her work, then, “tactical participatory design,”5
a more overtly political form of PD (DiSalvo co-opts her work for his
concept of “adversarial design”6).
Design and Culture
3. Design-based Art and Research

The hybrid of art and design in participatory practice is foreshad-
owed by performance and installation art originating in the 1960s
and, as we have already indicated, more recently by relational
aesthetics. It is, after all, part of the modernist credo to erode the
borders between art and life so that all experience is experienced
153
aesthetically. But there is another antecedent to which this hybrid

M. Holt
is related – art as “research.” Boris Groys in particular has analyzed

the shift “away from the artwork and toward art documentation,”
indicating that documentation is no longer only thought of as the
recording of an event or performance (2008: 53–65). Rather, much
contemporary art is not focused on the product or outcome of a
creative activity but “is this activity itself,” and therefore art becomes
“identical to life” (54). His examples are Sophie Calle, Carsten Höller,
and the Moscow-based Collective Action Group (1970s and 1980s),
among others, to which we could add any number of works from
the numerous global Biennales, but perhaps the most well-known
artists exploring documentation over the last fifty years have been
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov (for an overview, see Schlegel 1999).
Groys argues that this shift from discrete works of art to ongoing
documentation can be explained by the broader horizon of “biopol-
itics” – the relatively recent understanding of life not as a natural
occurrence organized according to its own rhythms and governed
by fortune or fate, but as artificial – produced, modified, designed
(56). When the paradigmatic distinction between the natural and
artificial is being increasingly blurred, then a life is no longer defined
in its organic capacities or limitations but in the fact that it is manip-
ulable, synthetic, and reproducible (and therefore not unique). The
organization of this synthetic feature of contemporary existence is
narrative – the process of documentation: “Art documentation is
thus the art of making living things out of artificial ones” (57). For
our purposes, what is relevant here is that as art becomes increas-
ingly a form of PD, it moves away from avant-garde interventionist
practices towards documenting user-generated content and experi-
ence, forming a new modality of integrating art and life.
An excellent example of recent researched-based art as it inter-
sects with participatory practice is Mathieu Gallois’ “Wellington”
(2012), an extensive project delving into the history of the rural
New South Wales town of the same name. Gallois’ grandfather
was the editor of the Wellington Times from 1945 to 1966. The
area is the traditional country of the Wiradjuri people, and Gallois,
as an architect as well as an artist, was attracted to investigating
indigenous relations to the notion and practice of “home,” an area
in which he confessed a profound ignorance. After consulting with
indigenous leaders and researching in depth the Wellington Times,
it became apparent that there had been much more coverage of
Indigenous matters in that paper than other comparable commu-
nities. While admitting that there is an enormous amount of work
to be done in the relations between the Wiradjuri people and those

that have dispossessed them of their land, Gallois has found the
story of intercultural relations in and around Wellington to contain
considerable depth of material and narratives to begin this pro-
cess. These stories have been collected and published (alongside
essays and other documents, totaling some 50,000 words) as a
Figure 3
Mathieu Gallois, Wellington, 2012, newspaper print, 64 pp. Front cover featuring
Wiradjuri elder, Joyce Williams. Photo: Mathieu Gallois.
“newspaper” itself and distributed as an insert in the Wellington

Times (Figure 3).7
Design and Culture
Intersubjective Design Aesthetics?

There is a genealogy of design aesthetics but as we have already
suggested it has generally been composed of the rejectamenta of
classical aesthetics. This prejudice was reversed to some extent by
the Arts and Crafts movement of the nineteenth century. But in real-
ity, it was less a reversal than a transference – the profile and values
155
of classical aesthetics (or medieval craftsmanship and ornament for

M. Holt
Morris) were transferred to the domestic, mercantile object in an

effort to accord it its own right to beauty. Behind this transferal was a
noble sentiment of improvement and betterment, and perhaps less
nobly a biopolitical imperative: to clean up the “great unwashed”
through aesthetic practices.8 The total design envisaged by the
Bauhaus, too, was to impart an aesthetic quality – but across an
entire environment, whether architecture, interiors, or objects. None-
theless this is very different from participatory practices and design
based on either user needs or community stakeholder groups – that
is, the aesthetic for the Bauhaus and the kind of modernist design
it represents is still something imposed by the designer rather than
generated by the interaction with a stakeholder.
Furthermore, and from the point of view of aesthetics itself,
Kantian aesthetics and its Romantic interpretation initiated a pro-
foundly influential tradition which emphasizes the decontextualized,
“formal,” and universal aspect of aesthetic judgment – the aesthetic
domain is the domain of autonomy, of “free” judgment, and the telos
of the beautiful (the central category of the aesthetic for Kant) is
noninstrumental. When Kant does countenance the useful and the
ornamental – for example, landscape gardening, “tapestries,” “bric-
à-brac,” and the “art of dressing tastefully” – it is only under the
condition they be removed from functionality and viewed entirely as
pure aesthetic entities (“without regard for any purpose”; Kant 1987:
§51, also §16). Nonetheless, the splitting of object or representation
into utility and beauty is grounded on a shared assumption – that
the aesthetic is constituted in a specific organization of the sub-
ject-object relation, one that emphasizes a certain luxury, as it were,
of reflection. As such, aesthetic experience that is durational and
co-created – not to mention associated with labor – is difficult to
reconcile in a tradition based on contemplation and subjective expe-
rience.
An aesthetics of intersubjectivity – a relational or co-created aes-
thetics – would look to other forms of aesthetic experience than the
regime of disinterested contemplation. Strangely, however, in the lit-
erature of participatory art, especially Bishop’s recent Artificial Hells,
the actual aesthetics of that form of art are rarely examined. She cer-
tainly acknowledges that there has been a rejection of “beauty,” har-
mony, finish, and the creation of discrete objects as the basis of art
– indeed participatory art is often considered simply “anti-aesthetic”
– but only notes in its place a certain fetishizing of research and
documentation that we have already touched upon and a general
acceptance that audiences get something from participation – either

inducement to further action or shocks from the demolition of the
fourth wall (and so suggests the “theatrical” as a model, but again
this is not followed up in any cogent way).9
Nicolas Bourriaud, on the other hand, has tried to formulate some
aspects of such an aesthetic (“relational aesthetics”), and over a
number of texts devoted to collaborative art, Kester (2004, 2011)
has offered important insights into “dialogical” art; it is worth, then,

recalling the essentials of their arguments.
1. Relational Aesthetics
Bourriaud claims “modesty” for relational aesthetics in the face of
the dominant schema of images produced in and by the “society of
the spectacle” (Debord 1994). It is not meant to be revolutionary in
either intention or scope and to this end he quotes Félix Guattari’s
idea of making differences at the “micro-political” level, and claims
that such art can provide a “rich loam for social experiments” and
“hands-on utopias” (1995: 8–9). Relational art which emphasizes
audience participation in a collegial, participatory manner, rather
than in the sense of the shock tactics of more aggressive forms of
audience integration, is a mode of encounter or linkage (reliance)
that Bourriaud argues literally articulates the private and the public
spheres, and the curator therefore agrees with Marcel Duchamp that
art is an “inter-human game” (19). Bourriaud also argues that the
conviviality essential to relational art – for example, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s
ongoing pop-up restaurants in galleries across the world in which
the artist himself cooks and socializes – is a practice of negotiation,
thereby, implicitly at least, evoking a form of democracy.
However, aside from a reference to the pleasure gained – the
“use-value” Bourriaud says – in interacting with artworks of a col-
laborative nature, there is no clear explanation as to what an actual
relational aesthetic might be. He thus turns to Guattari’s work to
find it because, Bourriaud claims, such an aesthetic must be seen
as a “reinvention of subjectivity” (89). In Bourriaud’s eyes, Guattari’s
position can be simplified (Guattari 1995): art is a mode of “subjec-
tivization,” that is, a technique or way of fashioning the self in an age
dominated by the commodification (objectification) of human rela-
tions. This reinvention of subjectivity as a form of aesthetic self-fash-
ioning is to “offer a person the possibility of getting back together as
an existential corporeity, and becoming particular again” (Bourriaud
2002: 94). The aesthetic experience offers physical and affective
forms of expression that, especially when relational and convivial,
provide alternatives to the kinds of “semiotization” – forms of signifi-
cation, expression, meaning-making, etc. – in which the spectacular
society traffics (producing and inducing the “pleasures” of consump-
tion, for example, rather than anything existentially meaningful). In
other words, relational aesthetics culminates in a somewhat archaic
Design and Culture
idea that physical, communal participation is likely to reengage us

with the pleasures of corporeal existence. Perhaps this is the case,
but if such art practice wants to be efficacious at the level of partic-
ipation even at a modest scale – “hands-on utopias” – intervention
into the material practices, technical habits, and the spatial distri-
butions of the manner in which our lives are arranged – that is, into
157
design – is far more concrete.

M. Holt
Besides, Bourriaud’s adoption of Guattari to explain relational

aesthetics belies other aspects of Guattari’s work (especially the
collaborations with Gilles Deleuze) on the “interface,” as it were,
between bodies and machines, and the emphasis therefore that
Guattari places on the concept of “non-human” enunciation and of
human-machine “assemblages” (1995: 37, 99ff. respectively; and
see Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 503–4, 510–11). From the perspec-
tive of design, the investigation into such hybrid assemblages is the
very definition and scope of its theoretical and practical terrain (not
to mention potentially very productive for art research). As such the
actual composition of Bourriaud’s communities is problematic from
a PD perspective. What Manzini calls “socio-material assemblies”
and Deleuze and Guattari “assemblages” are not solely composed
of humans; they are composed of what Bruno Latour calls “act-
ants” (2004), and those actants can be human, technical, or natu-
ral – indeed the sole consideration in defining an actant is not their
enduring identity or essence but that they have an effect on a situ-
ation or event. Co-created aesthetics is not subjective, perhaps not
even human. Indeed the designer, especially a designer involved in
PD, designs actants (or actors), not objects.
2. Dialogical Aesthetics
Kester’s notion of dialogical aesthetics begins with emphasizing that
Kantian aesthetics is underscored by the notion of possible shared
agreement which in turn is achieved by bracketing the instrumental
in order to “rise above” self-interest. But Kester goes on to ask: what
does it mean to “practice this sort of attitude in our relationships with
people rather than representations?” (2004: 108). In other words, for
art that is collaborative, durational, and democratic, Kester argues
that we have to examine a dialogic notion of relationships rather
than the characteristics of objects (representation), and so a relation
that is in many ways quite separate from the dynamics of spectator-
ship: instead of either attempting to shock and alienate the viewer,
or entrance the viewer in a moment of amazement, dialogical pro-
jects conceive of the spectator as a (relatively) equal participant in
discourse over time and therefore presume a commitment to some
“common system of meaning” (85). The definition of dialog as a form
of intersubjectivity Kester derives, with reservations and qualifica-
tions, from the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas.
But is participatory, collaborative art really a dialog, or only a dia-
log between people? The art of which Kester speaks, Ala Plastica
(Argentina), WochenKlausur (Austria), Park Fiction (Germany), Huit
Facettes (Dakar), Platform (Australia), Dialogue (India), inter alia, key
case studies for Kester, not only engage various communities but
co-design user-centered practices in tandem with those communi-
ties (the work that the group Dialogue does in the Indian countryside
around water access and distribution is an excellent example of this,
see Kester 2011: 27–8). Kester would by no means deny the effica-
cious aims of such projects but does not envisage this efficacy other
than as a function of discursive concord. Indeed Habermas’ best-
known work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, is
an interesting case for thinking about this. He famously argued that
the “public sphere” constituted by the rise of the European bourgeoi-
sie allowed for the rational argumentation of different points of view
(intersubjective communication), an essential element of democratic
politics. Most criticisms of Habermas, however, claim he disregards
dissensus in favor of consensus (e.g. Mouffe 2000, 2005).
Perhaps, however, there is another, equally important question
here: what, exactly, is this “sphere”? How is it materially constituted?
How do speakers interact with each other? One of Habermas’ key
examples of this sphere is the salons, cafés, and table societies
(Tischgesellschaften) of eighteenth-century Europe (1989: 31ff.). In
these spaces the educated middle class would meet and discuss
the latest ideas and publications. But what is not elaborated by
Habermas is that the material reality of these spaces precedes the
communicative act itself and makes it possible. In fact, from a design
perspective, it does not strictly matter whether the table or the dialog
spoken over it comes first; or, for that matter, whether some back-
ground notion of “equality” embraces them both. What matters is
that they are conjoined, and should be conceived as a designed
assemblage. The public sphere is a designed environment. To shift
the argument back to dialogic art, mutatis mutandis, not to recog-
nize the substructures and infrastructures of conversation circum-
scribes participatory art and design within the ambit of discourse
rather than within the field that design intervenes in: the manipulation
of space, bodies, movement, etc. To be fair, in his 2011 text The
One and the Many Kester looks more closely at the material level of
collaborative art projects, especially those engaging directly in urban
intervention and (re)development – as the group Park Fiction from
Hamburg puts it, in “parallel planning process[es]” (24) – but none
of these are recognized as design as such. Increased understanding
through “conviviality” and interaction is certainly an important aspect
of collaborative ventures of all kinds: witness, for example, the results
of Gallois’ project “Wellington,” where, indeed, greater communal
participation led to an augmented sense of involvement and shared
experience. But Gallois’ distributed newspaper is an “actor” in this
respect – more so than the exhibition of the project initially held at
Artspace, Sydney – and not just a result or a document of an action.
Design and Culture
It itself participates.
Conclusion:
Beyond the Contemplation of A
ppearances
Because the definition of participatory aesthetics, the fusion of art
159
and design at the level of ongoing self-determined collaboration, is,

M. Holt
Figure 4
“Homebaked,” Liverpool, bakery open, 2013.
as we have seen, “compositional,” interactive, broadly dialogical (to

include all forms of actors – human, technical, and environmental),
and durational, it does not belong to the regime of disinterested
contemplation and neither, therefore, to the order of representation
(so, too, then of audiences and spectatorship, etc.). This distinct
aesthetic has political significance. Under Kantian and Romantic-
inspired aesthetics, the political is determined as a matter of (poten-
tial) shared agreement – or its obverse in the case of “agonism”
(Mouffe, DiSalvo) – and thus a matter of communication and what
appears in public space. Under such a regime, designed things have
never been part of this particular concept of the public sphere and of
intersubjectivity in general because they are not autonomous or able
to be removed from an instrumental context. But PD/art is not the
meeting in a town hall, a becoming visible in a democratic space, or
a voice in a forum; rather it is the actual creation, as it were, of new
town halls, of new modes and paths of “vocalization.” Projects such
as Jeanne van Heeswijk’s work in organizing a community center,
a bakery (Figure 4), a park, a rezoning of an urban development,
a revision of waste practices, etc. intervenes and modifies public
space (especially in the spaces colonized by neoliberal urban exi-
gencies). Such art is participatory spatial design which has an ongo-
ing consequence beyond the momentary interruption in civic space

of an alternative voice. While by no means wanting to discourage
an agonistic, discursive approach to adversarial practices, nor for
that matter an artist’s quest for creative autonomy, I would like to
conclude that PD cannot only be understood under the order of
discourse or rhetoric, that is, as a “counter-public sphere” (Negt and
Kluge 1993). Rather it is a material assemblage – a “compositional

assembly” in the phrase of Nelson and Stolterman (2012: 159) –
effecting the way things work. It is therefore not a debate, contest, or
even a criticism (though it certainly may give rise to contestation). If
the aesthetics of the contemplation of appearances is, at its heart, a
question of sharing a judgment or opinion about an experience, the
participatory art and design hybrid is the creation of the experience
itself. The “social turn” in art identified by Bishop is in fact also, ulti-
mately, a “design turn.”
Notes
1. Or as Klaus Krippendorff has argued, a shift from “shaping the
appearance of mechanical products that industry is equipped
to manufacture to conceptualizing artifacts, material or social,
that have a chance of meaning something to their users, that
aid larger communities, and that support a society that is in the
process of reconstructing itself in unprecedented ways and at
record speeds” (2006: xvii).
2. In turn, much of design studies and design history has adhered
to this view of the aesthetic dimension of design – the appear-
ance of goods, for example, can be seen as expressing under-
lying social and economic realities and therefore can be read as
units of style, codes of desire, or symbols of taste, rather than
as active participants in the construction of history itself (for an
overview of those histories, see Dilnot 1984; and for an alterna-
tive approach to them, see Yaneva 2009).
3. In this article I emphasize PD but ultimately the argument could
be extended to all design that has taken a “social turn,” be it crit-
ical design, design thinking, design research, and other forms of
design that are more immaterial in both process and outcome
– for example, service design.
4. In many respects practice-based theory, if that is not an oxymo-
ron, is a radical alternative to semiotics – no longer can anything
be “read,” with phenomena no longer presenting an image,
face, or signifier behind which one finds their true meaning (even
if that meaning happens to be multiple in the case of connota-
tion); above all, there is no longer any generative “structure” to
be found behind culture, or the social. This is, of course, the
crux of Latour’s critique of sociology (2005).
5. While not exploring the art–science nexus in the same way,
Design and Culture
much of the work and projects of Lucy Orta, too, could be

placed in this category of tactical, PD; here I have her “refuge
wear” in mind, which combines fashion, portable architecture,
and potential social intervention.
6. DiSalvo opens his book Adversarial Design (2012) with
Jeremijenko’s “Feral Robotic Dogs” project (2002 onwards). The
161
robot dogs were originally released in a Bronx park and operated

M. Holt
by locals to gather information on levels of toxicity that then

could be collated for “adversarial” purposes, namely highlight-
ing danger to the health of residents of the area to the relevant
authority. Other examples of adversarial design that DiSalvo
provides are primarily from computational design, which is in
keeping with the history of PD. Jeremijenko’s robotic project,
however, also has resonances with the history of mapping, in
particular medical geography: it is a distant echo of John Snow’s
nineteenth-century cholera map. That chart was adversarial in
the sense that it went against all common and accepted inter-
pretations of what was thought to be a “miasmatic” malady, an
airborne disease, rather than, in fact, water-borne (Vinten-Jo-
hanson et al. 2003: ch. 8).
7. www.artspace.org.au/gallery_project.php?i=176
8. For example, Ruskin claimed in his Lectures on Art that “the
beginning of art is in getting our country clean and our people
beautiful” (2007: 56). By art, Ruskin also includes the applied
and decorative arts. Aesthetic improvement has a clear socio-
political function.
9. That being said, she does offer a brief account of what a
Lacanian aesthetics might be – an ethical aesthetics based
on his notion of “desire” and being faithful to that desire, as
it were – and how that might relate to the political dimension
of participatory art: “in any art that uses people as a medium,
ethics will never retreat entirely. The task is to relate this con-
cern more closely to aesthesis. Some key terms that emerge
here are enjoyment and disruption, and the way these converge
in psychoanalytical accounts of making and viewing art” (39).
“Enjoyment” is a translation of jouissance. Indeed there might
be an element of jouissance in participatory art, an erotics of
participation, membership, and sharing. But I would argue that
in emphasizing practice, goal-orientation, and finite assemblies
rather than a politics of identity-formation (or effacement as the
case may be), PD communities are more about delegation, ser-
vice, and articulation than “fusion.”
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Design and Culture

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Transformation of the Aesthetic: Art as

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literature around the aesthetics of collaboration

KEYWORDS: participatory design, participatory art, “designart,”

of an aesthetic applied to a range of objects, to design as the cre-

of the examples that opens Claire Bishop’s book on participatory

the often immaterial nature of information and communication. It is

object-based design to PD has led to – or at least created the

conditions for – a new hybrid of art and design substantially differ-

Participatory Design, Participatory Art

bureaucratic nature of institutionalized forms of public life and rep-

was radicalized along these lines with many organizations, design-

absolutely essential – the community of users are the designers. PD

decision-making is highly decentralized throughout all sectors of

Participatory Art, Participatory Design

The Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk’s project, “Talking Trash

also for planning (education) – a site removed from the demands of

renewal (http://www.faceyourworld.net). The project was intentionally

and predominately aimed at the youth of the area of Slotervaart, the

panel, and functioned as a sculpture when parked in front of the

market garden at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (again in

the exhibitors was not to challenge audience perceptions of either

performance and provocation, via the social, community arts projects

of the 1960s and 1970s to the project-based art we have already

1. Exhibition and Environment Design

product exhibitions – new products of the future have ever been

new museum design is the shift from displaying knowledge about

2. Art, Science, and Participation: Tactical Design

3. Design-based Art and Research

aesthetically. But there is another antecedent to which this hybrid

is related – art as “research.” Boris Groys in particular has analyzed

to be done in the relations between the Wiradjuri people and those

“newspaper” itself and distributed as an insert in the Wellington

Intersubjective Design Aesthetics?

of classical aesthetics (or medieval craftsmanship and ornament for

Morris) were transferred to the domestic, mercantile object in an

acceptance that audiences get something from participation – either

has offered important insights into “dialogical” art; it is worth, then,

idea that physical, communal participation is likely to reengage us

design – is far more concrete.

Besides, Bourriaud’s adoption of Guattari to explain relational

and design at the level of ongoing self-determined collaboration, is,

as we have seen, “compositional,” interactive, broadly dialogical (to

ing ­consequence beyond the momentary interruption in civic space

Kluge 1993). Rather it is a material assemblage – a “compositional

much of the work and projects of Lucy Orta, too, could be

robot dogs were originally released in a Bronx park and operated

by locals to gather information on levels of toxicity that then

October, 110: 51–79.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les presses

MA: MIT Press.

and Galleries.” Symbolic Interaction, 24(2): 189–216.

Hein, Hilde S. 2000. The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical

ing consequence beyond the momentary interruption in civic space