Jennifer Briselli
This article seeks to interrogate and reframe the role of friction in design from a separate and isolated phenomenon that hampers a system to one that emerges from the entangled interactions between objects and their environments and serves as a valuable feedback cycle within the system. This feedback can teach us how to facilitate more equitable experience ecosystems where agency is organically empowered to emerge instead of granted or allowed. To this end, design is overdue for a constructivist turn as a counterbalance to cognitivist and behaviourist modes of thinking. Constructivist approaches necessarily rejigger the relationships between designer and designed and reframe their interactions as emergent entanglements rather than linear dynamics. Drawing on the work of Dewey, Friere, Mezirow, Barad, and others, this presentation explores and synthesises key ideas from agential realism, transformative learning theory, and liberation pedagogy through a constructivist, systems-oriented lens to identify themes with great potential for the work of systemic designers.
Keywords: constructivist theory, transformative learning theory, agential realism, experience strategy
RSD: Learning & Education, Methods & Methodology