Imagine it is 23rd July 1973, you are standing at the bottom of a stone staircase that leads to a museum. Out of the entrance strolls a woman carrying a bucket and a mop. She stops, tips the bucket of water and starts to scrub the stone steps one at a time. This is Mierle Laderman Ukeles performing her art piece Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. Ukeles, a feminist performance artist whose work is themed around maintenance and service work, was the first artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation. Before this residency and her performance at the art museum she produced her radical Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! out of frustration with the art world’s failure to engage with the routine labour of everyday life, including dismissing her role as a mother. Ukeles subsequent work with the New York Department of Sanitation expanded this idea of maintenance labour beyond the domestic labour of mothers to the maintenance workers in wider society.
In the manifesto Ukeles writes how the world is split into the ‘development system’ and the ‘maintenance system’. The maintenance system Ukeles considers as ‘the life instinct’ where the aim is to “preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress” or to put it in more simple terms – keep things going. The development system – the creation of things – is ‘the death instinct’ focussed on “pure individual creation; the new; change; progress” (Ukeles, 2011, p. 382). The maintenance system however holds a low status in society due to it being repetitive, boring, and endless or as Ukeles writes “maintenance is a drag”. The development system on the other hand is “excitement”! Ukeles summarises the dynamic between these two systems in the sentence – “after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”.
I first came across Ukeles’ work while I was studying Fine Art as an undergraduate. Years later I was reminded of her work in a blog post by Charlie Morgan, an oral history archivist at the British Library. In his blog post Morgan discusses various issues he had with the large amount of recordings being made during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Morgan’s main concern was the emotional consequences of recording oral history during this turbulent period of time, arguing that oral history interviews should not be used as a form of therapy and objecting to oral history being used to document traumatic experiences. He suggested using Ukeles’ framework of the development and maintenance system to create a better understanding of “the ‘work’ of oral history” up to and including what happens when the recording is finished. Morgan rewords Ukeles’ question to ask who does the work “after the interview”? “After the interview” is exactly the period I was considering with my research.
At the centre of my project was a collaboration with the staff and volunteers at the National Trust property Seaton Delaval Hall, with the initial aim of exploring methods to encourage visitors to reuse oral history. A confusing challenge since the topic of oral history reuse is full of preconceptions, paradoxes, and contradictions. By the 2000s Michael Frisch labelled reuse of oral histories “the Deep Dark Secret of oral history”, since “nobody spends much time listening to or watching recorded and collected interview documents” [Frisch,2008, p. -]. In his paper, Three Dimensions and more, where he coins the term “Deep Dark Secret of oral history” Frisch offers three paradoxes of oral history. Frisch’s “paradox of orality” covers oral historians’ habit of using transcripts over the original audio recording [Frisch, 2008, p. -]. This however dates Frisch’s paper because in the years following 2008 the ability using audio has not only become easier but also more common with a wider cultural shift towards audio and visual media [ref.]. Similarly the “paradox of search”, which causes less reuse due to recordings not being sufficiently indexed or browsable (Frisch, 2008, p. 222), has also become easier due to advance digital technologies. At the time of writing his paper Frisch, among others, declared the solution to increasing oral history reuse lay with the developing technologies at the time. Yet, as I will discuss further in a later section, the projects which sort to improve reuse through technology failed to consider the maintenance leading to their eventual demise. Today, with the increased access to Artificial Intelligence it seems likely history might repeat itself as the magical allure of advance technology threatens to colonise the attention of oral historians with promises of easier and better reuse.
Frisch’s remaining paradox, the “paradox of method”, covers how there is a focus on recording oral history instead of reusing even though using archived materials central to the wider field of History (Frisch, 2008, p. 223). The focus on recording is unsurprising as the origins of oral history were based around filling the archives with non-elite material [ref.] This is evident in organisations like The National Life Story Collection, the charity working with oral histories in the British Library, which claims “Its key focus and expertise has been oral history fieldwork and for thirty years it has initiated a series of innovative interviewing programmes.” [website ref]. In addition to favouring recording Joanna Bornat, who has written on the benefits and obstacles of reusing having reused her own recorded material and that of others, observed a discomfort around reusing which she attributed to the field’s association to the social sciences where it is more common practice to destroy data instead of archiving [Bornat, -, p. -]. However, just because there is a focus on recording and a discomfort to reuse does not mean there is no reuse at all. Within the context of popular culture there are an increasing amount of historical book series which comfortably (re)use oral histories from a variety of different archives [ref.]. Furthermore, the turn to memory has also increased interest in how people remember making archived oral histories a rich source for study [ref. Leh?.]
However, even if reuse is becoming more common and it is easier to browse the audio, I cannot ignore the fact that: many of the endeavours to help improve the reuse of oral history through the use of digital technology no longer exist; at the time of writing the British Library’s collections of oral histories is no longer accessible due to a hack; I struggled to find many of the recordings produced by NLHF funded projects [PORTFOLIO REFERENCE]; and when I ask people where their oral histories are I am met with a guilty look as they admit to having some oral histories gathering dust on a hard drive somewhere [ref]. My initial aim for this project of improving reuse was based on the assumption that accessing oral histories is consistently possible. I realised the period “after the interview” included reuse and maintenance, the latter of which is not consider as much as the former because it is render invisible by people, myself included, taking it for granted. This revelation and remembering Ukeles’ work led me to change the focus of my research from reuse to the maintenance of oral histories – more specifically maintaining good quality access to oral histories.
This shift in perspective led to an important change in the approach of my design process as instead of focusing on making something to encourage more reuse, I aimed to create a better understanding of how we maintain access to oral histories. In other words instead of researching for design I decided to research through design. [Research through design is one of the deployments of design Frayling discussed in his seminal paper, title.] Research through design had various benefits to this particular situation. Like many creative practices it is non-linear and flexible which is essential when working across disciplins and collaborating with various stakeholders. In addition the invisible or taken for granted nature of maintenance means new information will be revealed throughout the project and design artefacts can be used as probes to help articulate the invisible.
The main aim of my research through design is to explain how the maintenance of access to oral histories is a wicked problem. Wicked Problem is a staple (although arguably abused) term in design which refers to multi-dimensional dynamic situations which involve several groups of stakeholders across a wider variety of fields with confusing and sometimes contradicting approaches [reference, Lucy]. The term was formally established by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber’s 1973 paper, Dilemmas in a general theory of planning and, as the rest of my writing will illustrate, is exactly what is happening with the access to oral histories.
Rittel and Webber, however, did not offer a definitive answer to how to solve wicked problems in their paper. They set up wicked problems as a form of problem solving which is non-linear and focuses on problem definition, which stands in opposition to the more linear and scientific form of problem solving. This simultaneous problem and solution development is central to many design methods often done through an iterative process [as shown in these diagrams]. Rittel and Webber also list ten properties of wicked problems, which in my opinion have garnered less attention from the design community.
(1) Wicked problems have no definitive formulation, but every formulation of a wicked problem corresponds to the formulation of a solution.
(2) Wicked problems have no stopping rules.
(3) Solutions to wicked problems cannot be true or false, only good or bad.
(4) In solving wicked problems there is no exhaustive list of admissible operations.
(5) For every wicked problem there is always more than one possible explanation, with explanations depending on the Weltanschauung of the designer.
(6) Every wicked problem is a symptom of another, “higher level,” problem.
(7) No formulation and solution of a wicked problem has a definitive test.
(8) Solving a wicked problem is a “one shot” operation, with no room for trial and error.
(9) Every wicked problem is unique.
(10) The wicked problem solver has no right to be wrong-they are fully responsible for their actions. [edit to be from R and W please]
The reason I believe these properties of wicked problems have been less central to design thinking and designing in general is because the focus of the design world is, using Ukeles’ ideas, development and many of these properties apply to maintenance systems. What Rittel and Webber try to illustrate with their properties is the “indeterminacy” of design problems – there is no limit and no concrete conditions [Buchanan, -, p. 16]. On face value this fact seems deeply unhelpful in its nihilism as it paints societal problems as completely unsolvable. However, by instead labelling the “problem” and “solution” as “situation” and “opportunities” as done by [Bailey et al.] this pressure to “solve the problem” is removed. Bailey and Spencer go a step further in their paper, Design for Complex Situations, where they offer up the idea that designing for Latour’s conception of “matters of concern” as not a “problem-solving activity” but as a form of research through design. The Wicked Problem or the matter of concern through this discarding of problem and solution because the subject of the Research through Design.
The closed nature of the problem and solution framework leaves little room for what happens “after the revolution” – after the project has ended. The more research focussed perspective proposed by Bailey and Spencer, which removes the bookends of problem and solution, recognises there is a time after the designer’s work. Bailey and Spencer also note how those who are working within the design situation are in a better position to implement changes or identify suitable opportunities [Spencer and Bailey, 2020, p. 71]. This particular design approach allows for more thought to be dedicated to maintenance and more open and transparent collaboration because it accepts the limits of the designer and the strengths of those who will maintain the specified design situation.
This form of Research through Design also led me to deploy an Action Research strategy which allowed the staff and volunteers at the various institutions I worked with to be ‘active participants’ in my work. As active participants, they were the ones leading the conversation, while I was the ‘friendly outsider’ who asked questions with the support of explanatory and exploratory design artefacts. These artefacts simulated dialogue by either presenting information on the existing situation in an accessible way or proposing an alternative future in a playful manner. The conversations with these active participants allowed all, including myself, to unpick these ‘conventions of practice’ and map out the previously invisible infrastructure, as well as identify areas for light design intervention.
My work with various institutions and the more in depth case study of Seaton Delaval Hall revealed the three main components of the situations wickedness were: evolving technology, changes in the law and regulations, and the continuous squeeze on maintenance work and necessary resources. Within the specific situation of my case study I attempted to navigate this wickedness by articulate the situation surrounding oral history to people within the Trust as well as creating a guide and strategy for the staff and volunteers at Seaton Delaval Hall. I recognise that following the rules of the wicked problem the situation of the Trust and the Hall can only be considered a unique formulation of the issue of maintaining oral history access, however I believe my experience is an example of how those who work with oral histories can manage it complexities, while designers can learn how to design for situation where maintenance is paramount. While I started with Ukeles and her separate systems of development and maintenance I conclude with the idea that maintenance and development can be, and in some circumstances should be, two parts of a whole.
Institutions like Seaton Delaval Hall and the National Trust are maintenance organisations, meaning one of their main aims is to preserve history for later generations. Similar organisations are galleries, museums, archives, libraries or any establishment that holds a collection of stuff in some format. Those who work in these types of organisations can therefore be consider maintenance workers. This PhD is not for them as it is likely they are all too familiar with my findings as they are their reality.
This critical commentary and its accompanying portfolio of practice is set up as follows