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Paper long abstract:

The paper shows the preliminary results of an ongoing project on the relation between fashion industry, universities and regional policies in Veneto region. Indeed, the off-shoring of production during last decade in this region and the consequent effort by recent policies to integrate research, industry and territory in creative sector seem to offer a privileged fieldwork to study how creativity is re-organized along with the re-organization of knowledge and landscape.

The case study has been conducted in a fashion company adopting qualitative research methods, through documentary analysis as well as collecting in-depth interviews with professionals and ethnographic notes emphasizing the socio-material aspects of fashion processes. The following questions are taken into exam:

- How creative process is performed and distributed?

- What kind of knowledge is at stake?

- How knowledge is organized in creative practices?

In exploring these questions, the paper aims to contribute to understand the formation, circulation and stabilization of "creative knowledge". Accordingly, the research maps the creative process and analyses the relations between fashion SMEs, university and government, following the accounts (and practices) of fashion scholars, practitioners and policymakers.

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Paper long abstract:

Following an ethnographic approach I am currently conceptualizing the practices of three design processes observed in a design research laboratory in Berlin. The proximity to scientific practices as described in STS is remarkable. In both fields, facts and artefacts exert a gravitational pull on the conducted practices. Pickering's 'mangle of practice' or Latour's 'translations' point out that science is a truly physical endeavour. Both design and science have in common to rely on knowledge and material setups. They differ, however, in their outcomes, design mostly takes the form of new objects whereas Knorr and Latour show that scientists aim at the production of papers. Furthermore, design seems to be messier, thus not fitting into the conceptualisations of science in STS. Dewey's 'pattern of inquiry', the 'mangle of practice' or the concept of 'translation' give a broad idea of design-work but bypass its crucial details.

Enlarging the perspective shows different types of representations like sketches, descriptions and mockups. They supply drafts with intersubjective relevance, help to test functions and shed light on future usage. These representations of drafts along with practices like drawing, building, testing and of course discussing stabilize and destabilize certain drafts, therefore shaping the design process. Creativity and innovation all result from certain types of material interaction.

Science and design have a lot in common regarding the notion of practice. Focussing on studying design practices offers new ways for refining STS concepts.

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Paper long abstract:

This paper proposes to reconfigure comparison as a method for innovation studies. It

explores how two objects, an installation and a robotic hand, are configured as novel

through the complexity of materialities, stories and bodies. In focus are small-scale

interactions, which are significant for how technological objects and their stories are

related, and how these relations are enacted. Its methodological approach stresses the

construction of comparability and the perspective from which is compared. Through two

configurative moments - 'rendering imaginative objects' and 'material referencing' - the

article delineates how the installation and the robotic hand materialise imaginaries and

how they articulate stories of their 'difference'. The proposed reconfiguration avows

novelty as a concept through which analogies can be drawn just as it acknowledges the

locality of its articulation in different forms. Its perspective is local as it immerses in the

net of materialities, stories and bodies, just as it moves on and re-arranges what is

understood and what needs understanding.