Designing With a Dialogical Sensibility

The primary tension emerging from the democratic paradox centers on manag­ing issues of convergence and divergence. Hamilton (2007) defines dialogue as “a pro­cess in which convergence and divergence exist simultaneously or alternately, rather than a process that moves in one direction toward resolution such as consensus on a course of action” (p.

Designers also need to be able to recognize when the time is appropriate to bring people together to claim an outcome and “craft con­sensus.” Sometimes, advice about public par­ticipation focuses too much on creating “good dialogue” and inadvertently neglects the fact the participants really do desire an outcome (Zoller, 2000) and will evaluate the value of the participatory process based on the quality of the outcome (McComas, 2001). Designers should recognize when the time is right to craft consensus by calling attention to shared values, new ways of thinking, and listening for resonance tropes like metaphors, metonymies, and synecdoches, which tend to crystallize points of view and act as mechanisms that reinforce paradigms (Oswick et al., 2004).

Given the democratic paradox, designers need to develop the ability to design processes that constructively connects problem-solving discourse, which focuses on consensus, with sense-making discourse, which builds under­standing of similarities and difference among a plurality of perspectives (Hamilton & Wills­Toker, 2006). Making judgments of how to build such connections is challenging because the tensions that designers engage in change over time and become intertwined and con­nected in different ways as they enter and exit the field of play. We offer the notion of sensi­bility as one approach that designers may use to develop and assess the tools, protocols, and processes they create (Barge & Little, 2002, 2008). Similar to communication as design, sensibility blends normative and descriptive processes to enable designers to make wise choices regarding how dialogical forms of communication can be invited and sustained.

Sensibility. Barge and Little (2008) articulate sensibility as “a moral-aesthetic framework regarding the commitments one makes toward issues of human agency and power within a tradition or community of practice” (p. 506). Moral-aesthetic commitments refer to the value commitments that a tradition or community of practice makes regarding what counts as moral, beautiful, and elegant prac­tice when working with issues, agency, and power. Moral-aesthetic commitments serve as living standards for evaluating to what degree one’s practice addresses the commitments one has made. For example, designers working within the tradition of Habermas’s communi­cation planning theory (Sager, 2009) prioritize design and practices that reflect communica­tion planning theory’s values regarding open­ness, fairness, and competence to work with people’s sense of agency and issues of power in a responsible way (e.g., see Renn, Webler, & Wiedemann, 1995).

The notion of sensibility addresses how practitioners such as designers make judgments regarding the way they design and plan pro­cesses in ways that align one’s moral-aesthetic commitments and the unique demands posed by the situation. Barge and Little (2008) argue that practitioners may have a wide repertoire of methods, tools, and techniques at the ready to employ in various situations. The way in which practitioners make judgments about how to design a process as well as which specific tools will be used in a specific context depends on phronesis, a kind of practical reasoning (Benner, 2000). Phronesis involves tacking back and forth between the moral- aesthetic commitments practitioners subscribe to in their practice and the particulars of the situation to arrive at a judgment regard­ing what tools and techniques offer the best opportunity to move forward.

There is not necessarily a tight coupling between a specific set of moral-aesthetic com­mitments and a particular set of tools and techniques. To be sure, particular traditions or communities of practice can develop spe­cific practices (e.g., tools and techniques) that evolve out of their moral-aesthetic com­mitments, and those who are recognized as a member of that practice tradition or community necessarily employ those specific tools. For example, the Appreciative Inquiry movement has articulated a distinct set of value commitments such as the generative and narrative commitment that has led to the development of specific tools and techniques such as the Appreciative Inquiry Summit, the 4-D cycle, and provocative propositions (Cooperrider & Whitney, 1999; Powley, Fry, Barrett, & Bright, 2004). However, sensibility allows for the possibility of designers utilizing other methods, tools, and techniques from other traditions and communities of practice.

The integration of other tools and tech­niques from different traditions and com­munities of practice can occur in two ways. First, tools and techniques from traditions and communities of practice that share similar moral-aesthetic assumptions or have a family resemblance can be easily integrated into one’s practice.

We want to focus attention on what we call a dialogic sensibility and how it might be used by designers to manage the tensions associated with engaging, managing, and sustaining dia­logue. Given that tools and techniques can be appropriated from various traditions, we do not present a list of the various tools and tech­niques that could be used to design dialogue. Excellent summaries of these approaches are reviewed elsewhere (e.g., French & Bayley, 2011). We focus our attention on the key moral-aesthetic commitments that constitute a dialogical sensibility and how these commit­ments serve as resource for managing tensions during the design process.

Dialogical Moral-Aesthetic Commitments. Barge (2003, 2006) initially articulated a set of sensibilities that practitioners such as community builders and designers might employ when they craft community dia­logues and conversations.

A commitment to affirmation holds that designers should develop dialogical pro­cesses that create life-generating moments of excellence through managing difference. One important thread in the dialogue lit­erature, inspired by the Appreciative Inquiry movement, highlights the importance of focusing on what generates life within a com­munity such as core values, best practices, and life-generating moments (Cooperrider & Whitney, 1999). While a good deal of support has been offered for using affirmative forms of dialogue, what counts as life generating is contested and what might be viewed as life enhancing in one instance may prove to be debilitating in another (Barge & Oliver, 2003). Therefore, we suggest that affirma­tive forms of practice are associated with introducing and managing difference using generative and productive dialogue (Deetz & Simpson, 2004; Gergen et al., 2004). For designers, this means that they are commit­ted to designing forums and tools that enable “differences that connect”—where some ele­ment from the past is given value to bring the past into the present but is connected to a dif­ference that opens up new forms of meaning making (Barge, 2004).

A commitment to relationality suggests that designers should develop dialogical pro­cesses that engage persons in understanding the systemic quality of issues, their history, the current state of play, and possible futures.

A commitment to generativity maintains that designers should emphasize individual and institutional capacity building for devel­oping new forms of talk, ideas, perspectives, issue frames, policies, and solutions. Dialogical processes are presumed to unleash the creative potential of people to create new ideas, per­spectives, problem formulations, policies, and solutions. They contribute to the mutual learn­ing that participants engage in as they further their understanding of the situation. Reed (2008) observes that people-centered partici­pation focuses on capacity building, which enables individuals and groups to develop their ability to address issues by having differ­ent forms of conversation. Designers working from a commitment to generativity need to pay close attention to how the events and processes they design model the kinds of conversations that they wish the participants will learn to have in the future and the kinds of prepara­tory work in the form of training and other developmental activities that will enhance the competence of individuals and groups to par­ticipate in the conversation.

A commitment to imagination emphasizes the importance of capturing the imagination of participants by crafting events that inspire people’s creative capacity. Reed (2008) points out that citizens often suffer from consulta­tion fatigue as they are continually bom­barded with requests for information, which diminishes their willingness to participate and engage in participatory activities. The chal­lenge is how to create processes and tools that fire the imagination of the participants and inspire their creativity, which, in turn, will maintain their level of interest and engage­ment with a project. Barge’s (2003) analysis of the Imagine Chicago project revealed that one strategy for fueling the creativity of adults was to create intergenerational activities that involve the arts. The energy and fresh perspec­tives that the children brought to the conversa­tions inspired adults to be open to new ideas and different ways of thinking and enhanced their commitment to the process. This suggests that designers need to create processes and tools that are creative, inspiring, and “sticky.” Gladwell’s (2000) notion of “stickiness” refers to the way in which certain messages literally stick with people over time, are remembered, and are continually referenced. Designers need to think about the way in which they can craft processes and tools that are “sticky,” which people find sufficiently engaging to keep returning to.

A commitment to conversation emphasizes the importance of designers focusing on the unfolding of conversation over time versus discrete events. In one sense, a commitment to conversation infuses design work as its purpose is to invite and create more produc­tive forms of talk. In a second sense, how­ever, a commitment to conversation involves recognizing that a discrete activity or tool is part of a larger unfolding conversation. Reed (2008) highlights this when he distinguishes between the “tool metaphor” and the “service contract” metaphor of public participation. He argues that most participatory approaches adopt a “tool metaphor” that focuses on the way in which specific tools are used to stimulate public participation and dialogue. This neglects issues of where the tool is placed in the unfolding process in terms of the past (what invited the use of particular tool) and the future (what the use of this tool invites). He suggests that individuals working with participatory practices would be better served by thinking of the process as a “service con­tract,” which suggests a focus on the longer term, and considering what sequence of events is needed to keep a process moving forward.

Designers who work from a conversational commitment need to develop three different kinds of abilities to thinking about how they can create processes and tools that facilitate the unfolding of the dialogue over time. Pearce and Pearce (2000) distinguish among the three levels of facilitation skills: (1) process design, (2) event design, and (3) microfacilitation skills. Process design refers to the overarching arc of dialogical process—how designers put together different events or conversational episodes in ways that build on each other and move the process further. Event design refers to a specific meeting, episode, or piece of the overall process. For example, as part of a larger citywide dialogue on cultural rich­ness, a town hall meeting may be designed and planned (Spano, 2001). Microfacilitation skills refer to the skills that facilitators may exhibit when conducting meetings such as reframing, summarizing, and agenda setting. Researchers have developed rich vocabularies and repertoires for event design and micro­facilitation skills but have tended to neglect the way in which processes may be designed over time. Process design skills are crucial for individuals to develop as they design dialogue.

In Barge et al.’s (2008) study, the designers created a number of tools and processes that reflected these dialogical commitments. For example, the commitment to relationality was shown in the Circle of Prosperity’s use of a multistakeholder dialogue tool called a pros­perity game. The game was intended to simu­late the “real” system in action by having each stakeholder team initially develop its vision and a plan and then subsequently negotiate agreements with other stakeholder teams in order to test out which agreements, proposals, and solutions were possible for addressing the issues and which were not. The commitment to conversation was demonstrated in the five phases of the strategic process carried out over 2 years where each phase was treated as a specific kind of conversation that had a particular purpose that was simultaneously a response to earlier conversations and in antici­pation of future conversations. The Circle of Prosperity began with conversations among the TCU presidents to determine the focus and scope of the project, with later conversations being expanded to include other stakehold­ers. The final phase of the process had TCU presidents meet to finalize their strategic plan. The designers explicitly viewed the strategic planning process as an unfolding set of conver­sations built on earlier conversations.