On Communities of Use

In reading the book, you can pretty clearly sense the author’s bias against the stereotypical office environment where politics have abstracted the intrinsic good of the work at hand.

Those who work in an office often feel that, despite the proliferation of contrived metrics they must meet, their job lacks objective standards of the sort provided by, for example, a carpenter’s level, and that as a result there is something arbitrary in the dispensing of credit and blame. (p.8)

His suggestion is a model of work where the worker can see what they have made in the context of a community of use (people who use the thing) and a community of practice (his fellow workers).

When the maker’s (or fixer’s) activity is immediately situated within a community of use, it can be enlivened by this kind of direct perception. Then the social character of his work isn’t separate from its internal or “engineering” standards; the work is improved through relationships with others. It may even be the case that what those standards are, what perfection consists of, is something that comes to light only through these iterated exchanges with others who use the product, as well as other craftsmen in the same trade. Through work that has this social character, some shared conception of the good is lit up, and becomes concrete. (p.187)

So, for Crawford, clear standards are important both for a worker’s sense of progress and a shared concept of good. And, despite his phrasing in the first quote above, he seems to indicate that what’s important is not that these standards are truly “objective,” but that they are anchored by the context of a particular community or situation.

I was struck by this discussion in the book because, at heart, Crawford is posing the philosophical question: What is good? When we design things, we have to ask ourselves the same question. Are we making good design? What does “good design” mean?

Like Crawford’s initial line of inquiry, one examination of what makes good design would debate the dichotomy of objective and subjective standards. There can be a lot to unpack in such a debate, but I have usually found both of these extremes as unsatisfactory in one way or another.

But the idea of a good that emerges out of a community of use and practice is a different framing that seems more meaningful to me. If we can accept design as a movement through communal and cultural change, then good design doesn’t happen when a designer is done with it, it can only become good through a continual shared exchange with a particular community mediated through the objects that have been designed.