Designing Accountability: The Managerial Semiotics Project

Abstract

Acknowledgement: This paper was written in the course of a research project directed by Anne Tomes and sponsored by the UK Design Council on the use of product market information in design decisions. The arguments and conclusions presented in the paper, however, are entirely the author's own. AbstractThe empirical occasion of this paper is an experiment by the Sharp electronics company in the application of semiotics to the management of aesthetic design. On the assumption that the visual 'signs' incorporated into products are freely translatable to and from linguistic messages, a verbal-visual 'dictionary of translation' was built up from designers' own accounts of the reasons behind their design decisions. The aim was to construct a form of accountability for design so as to render it transparent to managerial control. This exercise is viewed as an example of the continuing pressure upon management science ('consumer behaviour' in this instance) to produce languages of accountability through which expertise can be made to report to the inexpert. It is suggested that the market for such languages of accountability is rooted in virtual universality of the 'task-discontinuous status organisation' Offe (1976). Organisations of this kind are characterised by horizontal discontinuities at which the hierarchy of expertise gives way to one of managerial technology. It is these which pose the problem of agency to which languages of accountability appear as an answer.The problem is that such languages are constrained by their market to represent expert practice as intelligible to, and controllable by, a stratum of general managers. Where this is not the case, as is arguably so with aesthetic design, attempts to control practice on the basis of a misleading picture of that practice are likely to result in dysfunctionalities. In the case of the Sharp experiment the outcome was a naive attempt to convey a complex textual message through the choice of a colour for one of the company's products.The paper then discusses the alternative of allowing languages of accountability to emerge from the culture of practice itself. The problem here is that the resulting forms of accountability are likely to allow generous space for professional self-interest. A third possibility is then indicated: that of negotiating forms of accountability between practitioner and user on the model of community participation in architectural design.

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