My embrace of participatory design in this study intersects with two key resilience strategies; facilitating diverse stakeholder participation (Hauge Simonsen et al., 2014), and collaboratively generating alternative, future scenarios to enhance adaptive capacity (Moberg & Hauge Simonsen, 2011; Walker & Salt, 2006). These two strategies underpin the Phase 2 multi- household ethnography, and the Phase 3 participatory design workshops. Restating the definition offered in Chapter 1, participatory design is “a form of design practice embedded in specific contexts and working with particular
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constituencies to envision viable and desirable alternatives to the status quo” (Brown, Buchanan, Doordan & Margolin, 2012, p. 2). Conducted as inquiry, participatory design then presents the opportunity for specific contexts, constituencies, the status quo, and alternatives to it, to be explored and investigated with a depth and rigour beyond that typically supported within professional design practice.
In the service of a resilience agenda, the intentionality of design (as noted in relation to design agendas in the previous chapter) is directed in this study to collaborative, re-visioning design activities. To Simonsen, Bærenholdt, Scheuer and Büscher, “[d]esigning is intentional in terms of facilitating, encouraging, advancing, causing a change process that transforms one situation into another” (2010, p. 202). The change process is simplified by the authors in terms of ‘Situation A’ being transformed into ‘Situation B’. Applying this dynamic, the Phase 1 social-ecological analysis can be viewed as the key means of gaining a contextual, problem-focused understanding of ‘Situation A’, as the critical basis for initiating change through participatory design processes in Phases 2 and 3. In this study, the participatory methods enabled my co- engagement in the food-producing activities of 12 households, and subsequent knowledge-making with participants, again emphasising social-ecological systems knowledge. Phase 1, and to a lesser extent Phase2, were concerned with critically exploring the status quo, and identifying systemic and normative factors undermining resilience, as noted above. Particular emphasis was given to food choices, food preparation and eating in this initial analysis (detailed in Chapter 5), as I pursued a wider scope of inquiry than the relatively limited number of participants in Phases 2 and 3 would likely present.
With an orientation toward future scenarios in Phases 2 and 3, I sought to understand alternative practices and engage participants in envisioning viable alternative types, with the aim of devising urban resilience strategies. In Phase 3, the methods also involved a broader set of participants working to this
objective in a series of design workshops. The participatory design processes also presented an opportunity to apply a resilience lens to the accepted ecological design tenets of re-purposing, retrofitting and adaptation, at the interacting scales of the home, community and suburbs. This exploration is
expressed through the multi-household ethnography of Phase 2, and the participatory design outcomes of Phase 3, forming Chapters 6 and 7. The diversity of household settings represented, and the phased enactment of the research design also supported a complementary consideration of spatial and temporal scales, as I elaborate in Sections 4.4 and 4.5. I next detail how Phases 1, 2 and 3 of the research design were conceived as an extension of the interrelationships above, the rationale for the methods adopted, their theoretical basis, forms of data, and analytical approaches.
4.3 Phase 1: Social-‐ecological analysis of dominant food
culture and domestic design
Through a social-ecological analysis, derived from resilience inquiry and
merged with methods of anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, I explored visual and material popular culture of the kitchen, cooking and related practices. My aim was to critically explore the dominant norms in Eurocentric food culture and related domestic design, and analyse these against accepted, relevant ecological principles, set out in Figure 4.3. The principles are distilled from my synthesis of the literature (scholarly and popular), with the sources set out in Chapter 5 (refer p. 124). The analysis was also founded on the prefiguring roles of habitus and types, stated above, as reinforcing and reifying the ecologically degrading status quo. As expressed in Section 4.1, my particular interest was in systemic factors and normative patterns that undermine household adaptive capacity. Balancing the ‘social’ and ‘ecological’, I sought to address the symbolic values and meanings encoded into objects and environments
reflecting production-consumption imperatives, in addition to the identities and affective pursuits of people. The analysis is necessarily selective and
unreservedly interpretive on my part, undertaken however with deference to the theoretical framework in this section, and extending into Chapter 5.
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Figure 4.3: The ecological design and ecological food principles framework used in the Phase 1 social-ecological analysis
In Phase 1, I subjected a sample of artefacts to analysis, divided into two categories. The first category comprised objects and artefacts observed and experienced firsthand. The emphasis on firsthand analysis was informed partially by the visual sociological approaches discussed by Michael Emmison and Philip Smith (2000). These examples included food outlets, display
kitchens, a display apartment, an appliance showroom and comparative, pre- industrial domestic settings. The second category consisted of constructed representations such as new kitchen advertising, ‘foodie’ television, design magazines, and web-based media. In these examples, the interplay of text and imagery was equally of interest, a key point raised in Jon Prosser’s (2011, p. 480) work on visual methods. Across the sample, listed in Table 5.1 (refer pp. 124-125), I sought to balance as far as possible ‘green’ representations and objects with mainstream examples devoid of any such claim. The criteria for inclusion, rationale and processes of analysis are detailed below.