{"id":250,"date":"2015-04-28T18:01:54","date_gmt":"2015-04-28T17:01:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.darrenumney.com\/blog\/?p=250"},"modified":"2015-08-08T13:27:24","modified_gmt":"2015-08-08T12:27:24","slug":"drinking-outside-of-the-box","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/?p=250","title":{"rendered":"Drinking outside of the box – constructed worlds and designer frames"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kees Dorst’s new book, “Frame Innovation<\/em>” arrived today [1a]. His\u00a0first case study refers to how the proposed route Dutch high speed rail project took 15 years\u00a0to get off the starting blocks due to the limited frames utilised by\u00a0the politicians involved. So the book seems like a good prospect from this point alone. Also\u00a0though, and more pertinently, because Dorst’s\u00a0earlier work [1b] reflects, and is part, of the design canon.<\/p>\n

Dorst’s thesis examined the different descriptive paradigms of design expressed by Herbert Simon’s technical rationality on the one (positivist) hand and Donald Sch\u00f6n’s reflective practice on the (constructivist) other. Although Dorst concludes that these two perspectives both have a role in the understanding of design there is a persistent tendency to position these perspectives in fundamentally opposing positions.\u00a0I’m not sure\u00a0that there’s much room left on my mental bookshelf at the moment for any more debates about constructivist (good) and positivist (bad) that are predicated on persistent\u00a0fundamentalist and oppositional tendencies. It seems to me that they’re not that different, just as it seemed to Meng [2] that Simon and Sch\u00f6n weren’t so\u00a0far apart in the end. The only book that separates “The Fundamental Guide to The World” and “My Fundamental Guide to The World” on my bookshelf is Woolgar and Latour’s Laboratory Life [3] with it’s\u00a0exploration of the construction of\u00a0academic papers.\u00a0And even though this book would separate the other two it’s also\u00a0holding them together.\u00a0There’s a bit more to it than that I suppose but there does seem to be quite a lot of positivist faith in the constructivist project.<\/p>\n

And it’s Dorst’s faith that struck me as I read through the book. Particularly striking is his faith in his case study 8 which describes a design intervention to curb late-night alcohol-related violence in the streets of Kings Cross in Sydney. He talks about the Designing Out Crime Research Centre’s\u00a0proposals to turn Friday and Saturday night Sydney into a twice weekly “music festival” with chill-out spaces, better way-finding, better toilet facilities, approachable and cheery stewards who can offer help where needed, and more regular and easily accessible public transport to get everybody home. All very sensible responses that make a\u00a0festival experience run more smoothly, and music festivals have come a long way since the Rolling Stones played Altamont.<\/p>\n

Turning the city-centre into a\u00a0festival site then is presented as a “designerly” solution” to what he calls a “complex, networked problem”. The solution was \u00a0created by\u00a0designers “quickly reframing the issues that were presented to them by the local council”. They may also be designers who like going to music festivals but this isn’t made clear.<\/p>\n

It’s also not\u00a0quite clear from Dorst how much of this reframing has been implemented since the project originally\u00a0reported in 2009. Drawing on other sources it seems that in 2011 there were already more minibuses, more lighting and more urinals in the district [4] and the Designing Out Crime Research Centre<\/em>\u00a0Winter School<\/em>\u00a0in\u00a02013 reports that several of the proposed elements have been trialled in subsequent months and years although the results of these trials don’t seem to be\u00a0referenced [5]. Some\u00a0of the ideas have been incorporated\u00a0into the City of Sydney’s strategy and action plan for Sydney at night [6]. But in Frame Innovation<\/em>\u00a0Dorst maintains that “until it is thus tested, the proposed frame is just a possible way forward” [7].<\/p>\n

During this period of testing, if that’s what it was, two\u00a0people had been\u00a0killed as a result of alcohol related violence. The second\u00a0of these, on New Year’s Eve 2013, led to a series of government\u00a0reforms that imposed shorter opening hours, restricted licensing and better training for bar staff.<\/p>\n

So on the one hand the designer frame encourages more people to come to the fair with the promise that it will be cool\u00a0and easy to get home again afterwards. And on the other hand the\u00a0authorities, whose hand holds the keys, implements a lock-down that attempts to discourage people from turning up at all.\u00a0The New South Wales Department of Justice report into the impact of these official interventions \u00a0concludes that they successfully reduced the incidence of violent assaults in \u00a0Kings Cross by 32%. This reduction,\u00a0the report concludes, came about either through a change in\u00a0alcohol consumption\u00a0or a change in the number of people visiting the area. It is also reflected in the alleged fall in business revenue of between 20 and 50%.\u00a0[8]\u00a0And so the problem, and its solutions, remain complex and networked into the collective attempt to bring about positive change in a challenging world.<\/p>\n

It made me wonder\u00a0how far out does the designerly way of reframing a situation need to go. Designers are surely tied into their own\u00a0networks that lead them to reframe things in certain ways. While a cool music festival vibe looks like a good solution, especially if you like music festivals, it may also be too good if it encourages even more people into the\u00a0same crowded streets. Perhaps, like the Dutch high speed rail project, the\u00a0innovative frame is\u00a0elsewhere.<\/p>\n

For the railway project the successful frame was, for Dorst, the one that went\u00a0beyond the obvious confrontation about where the train would be routed and more about the fostering of magnanimous gestures of compromise made by those who lived along the route. For the late night drinking in Sydney it is perhaps less about the booze, and the economics of its consumption, and more about, for me, how we have become accustomed to accommodating\u00a0it.<\/p>\n

1a: Dorst, K. Frame Innovation<\/i>. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. 2015
\n1b:\u00a0Dorst, K. (1997). Describing Design – A comparison of paradigms<\/i>. Thesis. TU Delft.
\n2: Soo Meng, J. C. Donald Sch\u00f6n, Herbert Simon and The Sciences of the Artificial. Design Studies<\/i>, 30<\/i>(1), 60\u201368. 2009
\n3: Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. Laboratory Life. The social construction of facts<\/i>. London: Sage Publications. 1979
\n4: Designing out crime Sydney style<\/em>. The Conversation. June 2011.
\nhttp:\/\/theconversation.com\/designing-out-crime-sydney-style-1696
\n5:\u00a0Kings Cross Revisited<\/em>, Designing Out Crime Research Centre, 2013
\nhttp:\/\/s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com\/resources.farm1.mycms.me\/designandcrime-com\/Resources\/WinterSchool%20Booklets\/KingsX-Booklet-v2.pdf
\n6: Open Sydney, Future directions for Sydney at night<\/em>. City of Sydney
\nhttp:\/\/www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au\/__data\/assets\/pdf_file\/0014\/132224\/2013-054826-OPEN-Sydney-Strategy-and-Action-Plan-FINAL-version-February-2013.pdf
\n7: \u00a0Frame Innovation<\/i>.\u00a0p.54
\n8: Lockouts and last drinks.<\/em> Crime and Justice Bulletin, April 2015.
\nhttp:\/\/www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au\/Documents\/CJB\/CJB183.pdf<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kees Dorst’s new book, “Frame Innovation” arrived today [1a]. His\u00a0first case study refers to how the proposed route Dutch high speed rail project took 15 years\u00a0to get off the starting blocks due to the limited frames utilised by\u00a0the politicians involved. So the book seems like a good prospect from this point alone. Also\u00a0though, and more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=250"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":272,"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions\/272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darrenumney.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}