La conception collaborative et multidisciplinaire de l’agentivité anticipée d’une représentation visuelle : le cas de l’affichage environnemental de la durée de vie d’un appareil électronique

Nowadays and in the future, we will interact more and more often with visual representations that will invite us to take actions that contribute, for example, to the fight against climate change. Thus, a self-declaration, an eco-label or a multi-criteria environmental label will encourage us (or not) to recycle a product, to choose it or to compare it with other products according to the information that this representation and the signs that constitutes it should convey. In this scenario, the typography, shapes, colors and configuration of this environmental label will possess multiple forms of agency, the capacity to act, that is, to make a difference (Castor & Cooren, 2006), a capacity that has to be anticipated. The design of these visual representations, apparently inanimate but which nevertheless communicate and make people do things, is part of my professional practice: graphic design. Because of the more or less complex information they convey, these signs — icons, index and symbols, according to Peirce’s classification — will often have to be designed by a multidisciplinary team of experts, anticipating the multiple forms of agency they might possess once configured. However, although the process of designing visual representations has been extensively studied, we still know little about the collaborative design of the different forms of agency these representations may (or should) possess at the end of the process. Design studies suggest that a “shared professional vision” of the project to be designed emerges through visual representations — boundary and intermediary objects (Vinck, 2009) — encountered early in the trajectory (Comi, Jaradat, & Whyte, 2019). In this context, I propose to address the following research question: What is the collaborative and multidisciplinary design trajectory of the multiple forms of “anticipated agency” of a visual representation? To answer this question, I drew on ethnomethodology, (Garfinkel, 1984), the sociology of associations (Latour, 2006; Callon, 1986) as well as the communicative constitution of organization approach (CCO, Schoeneborn et al., 2014) to document and analyze the interactions between key actants — humans and other-than-human — that are making a difference during the design trajectory of an environmental label conceived to inform about the life span of an electronic device. The six-beat and four-movement trajectory (zooming-out and past/ future), that I analyse through the Prezi® presentation online platform, oscillates between key moments of collaboration between members of our multidisciplinary design team and consultation sessions conducted with an advisory committee of experts also from different disciplines. My reflective vision through the design of the “anticipated agency” of visual representations with visual representations — the first contribution of this dissertation — suggests that the environmental label materialized primarily through situated interactions with heterogeneous (in)tangible actants belonging to the past, present, or future. Indeed, multiple spokespersons speaking on behalf of, for example, the public (the consumer or the user), the manufacturer, the repairer, the political authorities or the (eco)designers of products have thus expressed themselves through the visual representations designed. The configuration of these signs — letters, numbers, shapes, colors, etc. — has induced multiple (dis) agreements generated by our respective professional and/or personal visions. However, these (un)shared visions of the “anticipated agency” of those visual representations, however, greatly contributed to the design process by revealing previously unseen actants and their power relations. This collaborative and multidisciplinary “(un)shared understanding” of the design process — the second contribution of this dissertation — could be a way forward to create visual devices that further mobilize human and other-than-human toward a successful ecological transition (Brullot et al., 2017).

Keyphrases: Collaboration multidisciplinaire, Graphic design, Design process, Multidisciplinary collaboration, Visual representation, Communicative constitution of organizations (CCO), Anticipated agency, Environmental label, Electronic device