The document summarizes a research article that discusses how design research can benefit from incorporating perspectives from the humanities and social sciences. It outlines some criticisms that humanists have of current design research approaches, such as how they can instrumentalize humans and promote consumerism. The document also discusses concepts like "affordance" and how meanings are understood in design research versus humanistic interpretations. The authors propose developing new paradigms that can find common ground between design considerations of affordance and humanistic understandings of meaning. This could provide opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and new approaches to designing and studying objects.

1. Reading Summary:
Affording Meaning: Design-Orient ed R esearch
from the Humanities and Social Sciences
《赋予意义：人文社科角度的设计研究》
by Julka Almquist and Julia Lupton
Design Issues, Winter 2010, Vol. 26, No. 1, Pages 3-14
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi.2010.26.1.3
Presented by Yifan Jiang on 11th Jan., 2011 at Studio TAO
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2. A b o u t t h e A u t h o r s
关 于 作 者
Julka Almquist is a PhD student in the Department of Planning, Policy, and Design at
the University of California, Irvine. In 2008 she was the Design Research Fellow in
Residence at Mayo Clinic's SPARC Innovation Design Lab. Additionally, she
teaches design research courses at Art Center College of Design, and is co-founder
of the UCI Design Alliance that aims to build a design discourse across campus as
an area of intellectual inquiry.
Julia Lupton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of
California, Irvine. In addition to three books on Shakespeare, she is also the
co-author with her sister Ellen Lupton of D.I.Y. Kids.
- A scial scientist and a humanist!
- 他们分别是一位社会科学家和一位人文学学者！
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3. The Problems with Design Research
设 计 研 究 的 缺 陷
“The dominant subject of our age has become neither reader nor writer
but user, a figure conceived as a bundle of needs and
impairments—cognitive, physical, emotional. Like a patient or child, the
user is a figure to be protected and cared for but also scrutinized and
controlled, submitted to research and testing.”
“我们时代占主导地位的主体既不是读者也不是作者，而是用户——它
被看作是一个在认知、生理和情感上的需求和失能的组合。用户像一个病人
或孩子，不仅需要被保护和照料，同时也需要被仔细查看、控制，被提交研
究和测试。”
-Ellen Lupton
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4. The "User-centered Design Model":
Critical Views from Humanists
人文学者对“用户中心设计模型”的批判性观点：
1. It instrumentalizes the human-being, making individuals "engineered
subjects", rather than "humanist subject" ——它将人工具化，使人从“人
文主体”降格到“工程主体”。
2. Because of it’s obsession with creating “use”, it becomes excuses for
the materialistic excess of a consumerist society which claim that the
imposition of needs to the consumers/users are based on “scientific
research” ——由于过度沉湎于对“功用”的创造，它成为消费主义时代
过度的物质生产和将“需求”强加于用户和消费者的借口。
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5. To take as an example，the “American consumer modernism” of child-proof
products are being designed and marketed to guarantee 120% safety for children
which can otherwise be acquired from training, development of habit, interaction
between parents and children, etc.
It can be read as the authors’ metaphor of design’s diminishing of human agency
and treat people as childish, infantile subjects who always need material stimulation
to keep happy.
举例而言，美国婴儿安全用品的“消费主义现代化”——大量婴儿用品被设计出来
据说用于保障婴儿的 120%的安全，而事实上安全是可以通过亲子之间的互动和培养
来获得的，这种意义上，设计抹杀了教育、学习和互动。——这个例子可被解读为一
种作者给出的隐喻：设计和消费主义相辅相成，将个人视作孩子气的主体，需要不断
以来新的物质刺激来保持快乐，消减了人的能动性。
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6. Design oftentimes becomes anti-social and
anti-creativity, design’s outlook stays narrow，because
the idea of “affordance” in design research is closed——
设计常常成为反社会交往和反创造力的事情，设计的世界
观狭隘了，因为设计研究中使用的“affordance”概念太
狭隘了！
Quote:“In many design studies, a design succeeds if it is used correctly; any
meanings brought to a design by a user are arbitrary and personal rather than a lived
dimension of the object as a signifying thing in a complex network of meaningful
exchanges. For many design researchers, meanings are simply subjective icing on
the cake rather than shared codes baked into the object itself, connecting designer,
producer, user, and the culture at large in a shared world.”
对目前的设计研究来说，如果设计品能被“正确地”使用，它就是成功的，如果使用者
对它赋予别的意义，那就是“武断的”和“个人的”，而不被认为是物品在意义网络（社
会中充满了意义网络）中的生命力的一部分。对现有的设计研究来说，意义是无关紧要
的装饰品，而不是物件的可以连接设计者、生产者、使用者和外部文化环境的核心。
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7. The Concept of Affordance
“Affordance”的概念
In design research, “Affordance” is a term frequently used to refer to
the perceived use of an artifact.| 在设计研究中，“affordance”（有译作“示
能性”、 功能可供性”等，
“ 但不如直接从英文语感去把握，词根来自于“afford”）
是一个频繁使用的表示被感知的物品功用的概念。
But the origin of the concept is different, it was coined by the psychologist J. J.
Gibson as a term in ecology to mean the objective condition that an element in a
ecological system provide for an ecological process to take place, e.g., dry wood has
the affordance to be burned by fire, mice have the affordance of being eaten by owl,
so on and so forth.| 但这个概念最初的含义并非如此，它是由心理学家 J. J. Gibson
发明的生态学概念，用来表示生态系统中一个元素所具有的能使一个生态过程的发生
的客观条件，比如：干柴有被火烧掉的 affordance，老鼠有被猫头鹰吃掉的 affordance。
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8. The Affordance in the sense employed by design research is
developed by Don Norman with his modification to Gibson’s concept.
It’s no longer objective, but inseparable from subjective perception.
设计研究中常用的“affordance”概念来自于 Don Norman，他修改了
Gibson 的概念，最大的不同是他的 affordance 不是客观的，而是主观
的。
According to Don Norman, affordance is the “perceived and
actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties
that determine just how the thing could possibly be used."
根据 Don Norman, affordance 是“物的被感知的和事实上的属性，
正是这些根本的属性决定着物可能如何被使用。”
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9. Humanists’ Dealing with Design：Strength and
Limitation 人 文 学 者 对 设 计 的 处 理 ， 其 长 处 和 局 限
Humanists do think and talk about design, obviously, from stage setting of
Shakespeare plays to medieval book decoration, but they tend to interpret
every designed artifact in their historical, social and cultural contexts and
distance the idea of universal affordance and use.| 人文学者毫无疑问也思考
和讨论设计，比如从莎士比亚戏剧的舞台布景到中世纪的书籍装潢，但是他们
总是将设计品放入历史、社会和文化语境中加以阐释，而排斥一种“普适”的
“affordance”和功用的观念。
Technically, the humanists lack a design vocabulary, and often fail to pay
attention to the functional specificity of objects, concrete aspects of how
an object can be effectively designed to carry their ideal. | 技术上说，人文
学者缺少设计语汇，往往不能充分关注物件的个体特性，不关注能够有效地
将能够承载他们的理想的物件设计出来的具体方面，文化理解淹没了对技术
细节的琢磨。
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10. Interesting Questions the Authors Ask：
作 者 们 提 出 了 有 趣 的 问 题 ：
“Could humanists integrate aspects of universal design—based on the
concepts of affordance and use—into their interpretive inquiries? And could
design researchers trained in design, engineering, and the social sciences
integrate their studies of use into a more nuanced account of meaning in its
social and collective dimensions?”|
人文学者能否将给予功用和 affordance 的普适设计纳入他们的解释框架？设
计研究者能否将对功用的研究与更多对于意义的解释和社会、集体维度相融合？
“ might it be possible ...to develop paradigms that envision the human
endpoint of design as something more than the “user” of a specific, quantifiable
function, while also conceiving of the meaning of objects in terms that allow for
universal applications? |
是否可以发展出新的范式？它能够使设计的假想目标超越仅具有具体、量化功
能的“用户”，同时又能使物件的“意义”具有普适应用价值。
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11. They propose：
他 们 主 张 ：
“ Finding common ground between affordance and meaning could offer a
collective space for interdisciplinary collaboration and new ways to approach
both making and studying designed artifacts.”
“如果能找到 affordance 和意义之间的交集，那么就有了一种跨学科合作的
集体空间，以及新的创造和研究人造物件的方法。”
“Here, it seems that design research would benefit from the humanities, whose more
capacious and flexible account of signification and subjectivity might provide accounts of the
user that resist or take issue with the social engineering at the heart of the modernist design
programs launched from both capitalist and socialist agendas. For what is at stake in finding
convergences between social-scientific and humanistic approaches to design is not simply
methodological. It is also ethical and political, bearing on the way we live with design, now. ”
“看起来，设计研究能够从人文学科受益，后者对含义和主体性的更加宽广和灵活的解
说可以对那个抗拒或质疑那种处于现代主义设计项目的核心的‘社会工程学’——无论
那是资本主义的还是社会主义的计划。因为寻找社科、人文方法与设计之间融合的重要
性并不仅仅是方法论上的，也是伦理和政治上的，关系到我们当下与设计共处的方式。”
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12. The Way Out? - New Paradigms!
路 在 何 方 ？ — 新 的 范 式 ！
New Paradigm1: Design Ecology| 新范式一：设计生态学
Since Gibson's idea of affordance is originally an ecological idea - "a way of
understanding the various forms of life that a particular habitat could afford to a variety
of species" - why don’t we utilize the concept of “ecology” to bring environment and
society back in to design? Environment ”in the sense of engaging interconnected
networks of meanings and uses by multiple constituencies”.|
既然 Gibson 的 affordance 概念本来是一个生态学概念，那么我们为何不利用“生
态”这个概念将环境和社会带回设计？“环境”（环绕着我们的的所有条件）在此指的
是“让各种相关人群的意义和功用的网络都被纳入考量。”
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13. Quote:
“The emphasis in the humanities on context and culture can help us map
environments in terms of meaning and significance as well as relations of force and
ideology, while the social-scientific development of ethnographic tools for design
research can further unfold the intersubjective dimensions, communal settings, and
material costs that attend living with objects without losing sight of usability.”|
摘录：
“人文学科对语境和文化的强调可以帮助我们同时根据意义和重要性，以及力量关
系和意识形态来对环境进行分析界定，而社会科学中的民族志工具能有助于设计研究
进一步展开（社会中）主体间的（intersubjective，人与人之间的，群体与群体之间的）
维度、社区环境，以及物质代价这些与物件息息相关的东西，而同时也不丢失对可用
性的关注。”
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14. New Paradigm2: Interobjectivity| 新范式二：客体间性
Bruno Latour, the French Anthropologist of Science and Technology coined
this term, he "resist the dualistic distinction between technology (the world of
artifacts) and society (the world of human subjects)", and contends that "objects
are players in social networks composed of both human beings and things",
"social theory has ignored the importance of objects...made things are
fundamental to human interaction"
法国科学和技术人类学家 Bruno Latour 发明了“interobjectivity”（或译“客
体间性”、“交互客体性”、“互为客观性”，等等）这个术语，他抗拒“技术
（人造物件的世界）和社会（人类主体的世界）之间的二元划分”，认为“物件
是由人类和物共同组成的社会网络中的‘演员’”，“社会理论忽略了物件的重
要性……人造物对人类互动来说是至关重要的。”
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15. So, what to realize?
目 标 是 什 么 ？
1. “Design research—both research in the service of the design
process, and research into the role design plays in contemporary
and historical life—should be oriented around the common ground
between use, meaning, and affordance, which is also the common
ground between designers and ‘users’.”
“设计研究——服务设计过程的研究和对设计在当代和历史生活中扮
演的角色的研究——应该面向功用、意义和 affordance 之间的共同
领域，它同样也是设计师和‘用户’之间共同的领域。”
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16. 2. “This dynamic and fluid region includes the latent functions and
meanings of designed objects and environments that are brought out
by acts of use, repurposing, and interaction, and thus constitutes the
space in which “users,” construed and constrained narrowly by
instrumentalizing design thinking, become genuine human subjects,
bearing memories, desires, and creative capacities that cannot be fully
predicted by research conceived on determinist or behaviorialist
grounds”
“这个动态和流动的区域包括了设计出来的物品和环境的隐形功能和意
义，它们被使用、改变使用目的和互动行为带出来，创造出了一个‘用户’
（被狭隘地用工具化的设计思维所想象和限制）成为具有不能被决定论
和行为主义立场的设计研究所预测的记忆、欲望和创造力的真正的‘人性
主体’的空间。”
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17. Exemplary practices found in reality:
“New social movements emphasizing sustainability, fair labor, and
D.I.Y. (“Do It Yourself”) processes and communities are staking their
interests in this dynamic middle ground. ”
现实生活中符合这种愿景的榜样：
“那些强调可持续性、公平劳动和 DIY 过程和社区的新社会运动正将
它们的兴趣放在这个动态的领域中。”
End
结束
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