1. ‘Good communication’ is often the assumed objective for the field and practice
of communication design. But in attempting to facilitate ‘good
communication,’ designers may potentially overlook the qualities of
participation in communicative arenas that shape normative constructs of the
publics of communication. At the same time, they might not attend to the
particular political formations that emerge from and mobilise communication.
I propose and develop the concept of miscommunication and the practice of
miscommunication design as a way to query these assumptions from within
communication design. Because communication design has become more
centrally involved with socially and politically engaged design practices,
approaches to communication are critical for taking account of how political
engagements unfold. In this study, I explore that which diverts from ‘good
communication,’ by exploring miscommunication as a powerful and
transformative part of communication that could generate new modes of
practice and recast the field of communication design as a diverse activity
open to eco-political modalities of practice. I develop this research by
analysing a set of creative practice projects that work through and trouble
communicative actors and settings. I further support these analyses through the
development of a set of exploratory practices that explore sites of political
encounters and political possibilities.
Drawing from the work of Michel Serres and Isabelle Stengers, I work
through three figures of miscommunication, including the parasite, the idiot
and the diplomat. With these figures, I expand on distinct possibilities for a
practice in miscommunication design by investigating forms of noise that
interfere with good communication, by working with impasses to
communication through apparent moments of nonsense, and by setting up
translational encounters shaped by miscommunication. On the basis of
working through these three figures of miscommunication, I propose a set of
inventive practices that seek to multiply modes of encounter and political
formations within the field of communication design. These inventive
practices are structured as ‘political scenes,’ a concept and term that draws on
the work of Stengers and that refers to a practical grounding of the political.
Political scenes can challenge common communication design practices by
working with miscommunication that emerges from specific situations.
Moreover, political scenes reposition the designer as a participant in
communication who is informed by the affective, performative and material
dimensions of communication, and is also seen as an interfering part of
communication. In this way, political scenes can foster and explore a new set
of connections and communicative formations that matter to the field of
communication design because they create the possibility for new qualities of
participation in communicative arenas, which may in turn give rise to new
political ideas and questions, along with new possibilities for collective
formations.