ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the emergence of user-centred and participatory Scandinavian design ideas and practices in 1970s Sweden. Many of the concepts and methods still highly present – supported as well as contested – in contemporary design stem from the turn towards collaborative designing through the late 1960s and early 1990s. However, in Nordic design history, these radical changes in design practice have been more or less invisible. This chapter argues that a shift in perspective is needed in design history in order to address this design historical gap, while also highlighting the historicity embedded in contemporary practices of design. Shifting the design historical outlook from products to practices calls other Scandinavian design histories than the usual to the fore, suggesting narratives attentive to how and why designing itself has been re-designed. The two examples of transitional design histories given here aim to open up conceptual spaces necessary for re-thinking what design’s histories could be, also in relation to what designing may be becoming. The first example highlights how ergonomic user-centred design methods expanded the role of designers and designing in relation to ideas of use and users, linked to Swedish disability legislation and research funding. The second example discusses how participatory design was called into being as challenges of designers’ and users’ co-development of computer-based work tools expanded ideas of what design was, how and with whom designing took place, and with what kinds of materials. These transitional design histories aim to expand the views of what is discerned as relevant histories of design, while simultaneously calling attention to the historicity embedded in contemporary and emerging design methods and ideas. Following the traces and trajectories of changing design practices, histories of designing contribute to unpacking concepts central to expanding understandings of what design has been, as well as of what it could become.
