Paper short abstract:

Anticipation is an integral part of designing raising the question what type of knowledge is involved. Building on an arenas of development approach the article explores how design interventions are elements of navigating ordering processes.

Paper long abstract:

Socio-material design interventions are not only engagements with a completely unknown terrain and actors operating within this, but are based on considerations and repertoires of knowledge of similar terrains re-visited and analyzed as part of the engagement. Building on the arenas of development approach the article explores the relationship between anticipation and intervention as network and knowledge building strategies. The arenas approach takes the outset in established matters of societal concern that has provided the frame for actor's engagement in controversies as well as network formations and stabilizing activities including those of boundary formation. (see Jørgensen: 'Mapping and navigating transitions - the multi-level perspective compared with arenas of development', in Research Policy, 41(6), 2012) The arenas approach developed for use in situations of uncertainties and flux as it represents the performed actions of actors catering for both stabilizations, destabilizing actions and the emergence of new forms and relations in-between socio-technical entities that constitute the arena. The approach to the field of anticipation is the continued move between mapping actions that take outset in these, and the exchanges on the arena framing and reframing the actors and their performed actions. While the traditions in governance and in social learning tend to maintain stability concerning some of the involved entities, the navigational approach operates with a continual process of shifting between intervention and reflections on the responses resulting from these interventions. In this process, the anticipation provides the temporal experience base that provides the options for mapping and the interpretative framework to reflect on the responses resulting from the intervention.