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Arts & Communication Speculative ubimus design

with artwork-related concepts and methods. In terms of
epistemic exchanges, timewise, the use of materials and
surrogates was evenly spread. Of the 56 initiatives, 23
were surrogates and 33 involved materials. Subject 1 relied
heavily on the exchange of materials, while Subject 2 shared
both types of resources. Almost all executive exchanges
involved proposals (85%). Only seven of the 48 dialogical
exchanges were explicit rejections or approvals.
InMesh’s esthetic decisions relied mainly on verbal
or conceptual exchanges. The importance of verbal
interactions during the design of InMesh may be related
to the central topic of the piece — the cultural attitude
toward animal life — or it may be an unintended
consequence of the support tool chosen for the work, the
project-management system Evernote. Creative surrogates
constituted over 40% of the epistemic interactions. The
decision-making strategies avoided any explicit approvals
or rejections of the creative products. This observation
suggests a mechanism of consensus-building by sifting, that
is, most decisions are collaborative, engaging in organic
dialog rather than through confrontation. A key aspect of
this process is building upon and expanding each other’s
ideas. This strategy is more efficient than the pervasive
and explicit acknowledgments enforced by social-network
platforms. On the downside, it reduces the ability of
designers to track the participants’ intentions in detail
(Figure 1).
Example 1. InMesh 1.0 excerpts.

http://capassokellertinajero.squarespace.com/portfolio#/
inmesh

4.1.3. Discussion
An unintuitive result of the processes observed during
InMesh 1.0 is consensus by sifting. This process is well
documented in political sciences, sometimes described Figure 1. Consensus by sifting: A flowchart generated by DiagramGPT.
as “the silent majority.” Does the absence of further The applicability and the limitations of this creative strategy are
engagement in a decision-making activity imply a positive highlighted by the use of speculative-design methods.
or a negative outlook for an esthetic choice? How far stakeholders who take all decisions while adopting specific
should explicit confirmation or rejection be induced by the criteria for the assignments: some agents act on everything
support infrastructure? Considering agents and actants, an (some-all). Or it may involve reducing the quantity of items
9
extreme case may be labeled every agent acts on everything to be acted upon by applying automation or generative
(all-all). This configuration is feasible for small groups techniques: every agent acts on something (all-some).
dealing with a small number of targets. As the number of
actions and the number of stakeholders increase, there is a Thus, it becomes clear that eventual caveats of consensus
tendency to reduce the level of engagement of both actions by sifting are not related to the ability to reach consensus,
and participants. This process may entail relying on a few preserved by either some-all or all-some strategies, but
they lie in the lack of validation of the outcomes. While the
9 We adopt the linguistic definition of actant, a material object all-some strategy enables a limited form of participation
that acts, without any reference to semiotics or any other in every decision, the some-all procedure constrains the
similar connotation. https://www.oxfordreference.com/ number of stakeholders that handle the decisions. This
display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095348288 policy of “representation by the few” goes against the grain

Volume 1 Issue 2 (2023) 6 https://doi.org/10.36922/ac.1597