Relocating innovation: Places and Material Practices of Future Making

Lucy Suchman - Lancaster University

This talk explores the question of how we might engage both critically and generatively with the contemporary figure of innovation. I suggest as one resource the concept of location, as it has been articulated within anthropological, feminist, and (post)colonial research. I take as a starting place the premise that we cannot think about innovation separately from the political, economic, and disciplinary histories that imbue that word with its currency. More specifically, we need to attend to the ways in which the professionalization of design in the last century, in the midst of kindred projects in modernist rationalization, has included a legacy of hegemonic claims to the question of what and whose knowledges are relevant to our collective future making. Only by engaging critically with that history can we extricate ourselves from what are arguably the extraordinarily repetitive terms that have been available to us for articulating processes of change. In writing about innovation’s relocation, my argument is that design needs to acknowledge the specificities of its place, to position itself as one (albeit multiple) figure and practice of transformation.