Constructing Design Knowledge for Postdigital Science and Education

In this chapter we draw upon our program of research into interdisciplinary science and education to explore some relations between postdigital research and the construction of locally-useful design knowledge. We introduce the Activity-Centred Analysis and Design framework (ACAD) and explain how design knowledge – knowledge that is useful for design work – can be constructed through alternating processes of collaborative analysis and design. ACAD uses a dual ontology that permits reasoning about both complex entangled human activities and the physical, social and epistemic phenomena that situate those activities. A postdigital disposition entails an interest in things digital and simultaneously in the other material, social, and epistemic things that constitute, motivate, complicate, and conceal the digital. We are interested in finding out more about how people learn to flourish, and indeed help each other flourish, in the complex situations and practices that can be characterised as postdigital, postdisciplinary science and education. We argue for focusing on how people work together when they are trying to understand what shapes their current epistemic (knowledge-making) practices, how they analyse problems and find opportunities for change and how they create and agree designs for better ways of working.