Compreendendo as competências do briefing a partir da teoria ator-rede

Abstract

In common sense, design brief is understood as an important component in any project because contains necessary elements that explain the problem, guiding those involved in design process. Going further, design studies understand it as something that generates dialogue among the actors involved in design process (ZURLO, 2010), not being too restrictive or too vague (BROWN, 2009), helping to frame problems (BUCHANAN, 1992) and enabling more criteria to design (Associação dos Designers Gráficos do Brasil, 2004), but these conceptions do not seem to be in tune to theoretical movements about the design process itself. Understood as transdisciplinary, non-linear and coevolutionary (MAURI, 1996, FINDELI, 2001, DORST, 2003), design process seems more open than what their own studies posit about design brief. In this sense, this research proposes to inquiry what are the competencies of the briefing in the design process. To understand their competencies, the theoretical-methodological perspective of Actor-Network Theory is adopted because its principles contribute to achieve other understandings about the relations established on design’s dynamics. That means, for Actor-Network Theory, it is impossible to distinguish between humans and non-human, or empirically point out differences between their actions generating facts and artifacts (LAW 1992, CALLON 1986): they are understood as actants (LATOUR, 1999) with agencies that mediated and intermediated (SAYES, 2013) the emergence of matters of concern (LATOUR, 2008) in a processuality that enacts (LAW, 2009) itself in the realm of competencies or ‘being-able-to-do-something’ (FIORIN, 1989), therefore, bringing a new light to design discussion. Adopting the content analysis method over a documental analysis of 58 briefings (sent by 6 informants that called themselves design offices or 'design department companies') and later over two focus groups composed of 3 and 4 informants, respectively (following the same criteria of data collection), this research proposes general topics that present the briefing with competencies of 1) enact the design action, expanding the critical reflexive capacity when operating creative assemblages and temporal displacements; 2) mediate interests of actants related to the design process (establishing a sort of leveling of distinct orders that stabilize the network formed around the design process), translating itself (being plastic enough to shape itself towards different design process) and emphasizing and clarifying the interests, opening competencies which the design process should be sensitive and aware of; 3) inscribe the designer as someone capable of dealing with the interests at stake through an archeology that goes to the depths that are not explicitly (such as market or sensitivities), or dealing with purely technical aspects, in a movement that evidences 4) the ambiguous and ambivalent use of the briefing, guiding the design process as something that takes in in its account a plural and diverse natures.