Communication as Design

The notion of design and being a designer has emerged as an important concept for creating goods and services. For example, companies such as Apple and Target are noted for their ability to design products that are not only practical and useful but also have a sense of style.

The notion of communication as design begins with the premise that it is conceivable to shape conversations and discourse in ways that promote productive interaction among persons and make difficult, incoherent, and unman­ageable conversations possible. As Aakhus (2007) observes, “Communication design hap­pens when there is an intervention into some ongoing activity through the invention of techniques, devices, and procedures that aim to redesign interactivity and thus shape the possibilities for communication” (p. 112). It is based on the commonsense notion that when individuals encounter interactional problems, they employ strategies and techniques to man­age the conversation and resolve their interac­tional difficulties. Viewing communication as design suggests that individuals and communi­ties have preferred and nonpreferred ways of communicating and the task for communica­tion scholars is to articulate the normative commitments regarding how communication ought to be and to design tools and practices that bring communication practices into closer alignment with these ideal norms.

There are at least two ways that commu­nication scholars can engage the design enter­prise. First, they can take a design stance when analyzing communication. Using a design stance when conducting empirical communi­cation analyses requires creating rich detailed descriptions of an existing communication practice, identifying the hypotheses about the communication practice that constitute its design, and then critiquing and reconstructing the practice to identify how communication might be more profitably managed. Aakhus (2007) suggests that such analyses may focus on a particular practice such as the con­versations between lay people and scientists (Aakhus, 1999) or the way divorce mediators use their tools to engage in critical discussion, bargaining, and therapeutic discussion ( Aakhus, 2003; Jacobs & Aakhus, 2002). Second, com­munication scholars can also design, test, and evaluate tools to help manage interactional problems. For example, Jackson (1998, 2002) developed online protocols to support students in using argumentation concepts and practices, while Aakhus (2010) developed a set of online reflection tools to facilitate medical students’ systematic reflection on difficult conversations that they encountered.

The notion of communication as design has both a descriptive and normative founda­tion. Communication as design focuses our attention on the performance of practice or its accomplishment in interaction. For example, the design logics that Jacobs and Aakhus (2002) identify regarding the practice of mediation are not something that an individual possesses; rather, they are something that mediators do during the course of conducting mediation. Articulating the discursive performance of a practice requires empirical work that rigor­ously investigates how the discourse works. Communication as design also has a normative foundation as it aims to identify what should be ideal forms of communicative practice. The descriptive and normative foundations of design are intertwined, “Within a design enterprise, models must be both descriptive and normative, which is to say that they are accountable on the one hand to values and ideals and on the other hand to actual practices and circumstances” (Aakhus & Jackson, 2005, p.

The material designers create interven­tions from is basic communication processes that characterize communicative episodes. Aakhus and Jackson (2005) identify seven elements that designers of communication should take into account when developing tools: (1) turn-taking formats, (2) partici­pant identity and face, (3) commitments and their formulation, (4) how act sequences can be expanded, (5) the way repair may be used to coordinate actions, (6) interactional consequences, and (7) cultural assumptions regarding what kinds of communication are permitted, prohibited, or obligated. Designers of communication can create tools that foster productive interaction by chang­ing and shaping these basic communication processes.

Table 23.1 provides a summary of the tensional clusters drawn from the public par­ticipation and community dialogue as well as a set of questions for each cluster that design­ers of dialogue may pose. These tensions may be viewed as posing interactional challenges for designers and participants in dialogues that need to be considered when designing strategies, methods, and tools for managing conflict within communities.

Table 23.1 Dialogical Tensions and Design Questions

Barge et al.’s (2008) study of multistake­holder dialogues to manage conflicts in strate­gic planning is illustrative of the way in which dialectical tensions inform communication design.

Barge et al. (2008) identified three primary tensions that influenced the design of the over­all dialogue process: (1) inclusion-exclusion, (2) preservation-change, and (3) centrality -parity. The inclusion-exclusion tension cen­tered on whether all 32 tribal college presi­dents would be present at each phase during the dialogue, a physical impossibility given limitations due to size, funding, and par­ticipant location. The preservation-change tension reflected competing pulls to simulta­neously preserve tribal culture and heritage while at the same introducing information technology to Indian country. The centrality­parity tension concerned the need to keep the TCUs at the center of the process while at the same time needing to treat them as equal to the other stakeholders.

According to Aakhus (2007), communica­tion tools are developed to manage interac­tional difficulties, and these tensions influenced the way in which the overall dialogue process was intentionally organized by members of the design team. First, the inclusion-exclusion ten­sion was managed by developing procedures for providing continuous feedback to tribal college presidents who were not present at dif­ferent phases in the dialogue such as written briefing documents and face-to-face meetings, a strategy known as commonplacing. Second, the preservation-change tension was managed through the strategy of bounded mutuality where the oral and written materials that were used to frame the process for partici­pants placed cultural preservation as the frame for determining how information technology would be used.