Artful material utterance: a core competence for participatory designers

This paper explores the idea of 'material utterance' as a way of reflecting on and analysing specific communicative actions in the practice of designing, and in particular for participatory designing. Material utterance extends the notion of utterance as used in linguistic pragmatics. This approach focuses attention on particular, situated communicative actions and draws attention to their materiality and embodiment. Using examples from a single participatory design initiative, the paper illustrates how attending to the specifics of individual material utterances, and relating them to the speaker/maker's intent, provides a useful perspective for reflection on our practice.