I am going to start by repeating Susan Leigh Star’s call in, The Ethnography of Infrastructure, to study “boring things”.1
At the start of my research I attended many talks, seminars, and lectures that touched upon this mystical mysterious thing – ‘the archive.’2 I read Derrida’s Archive Fever and other people’s commentary of the text.3 I did drawings of how it felt to be in an archive and compared the experience to playing open world video games.4 I ran a workshop where the first activity had the participants write down all the words they associated with ‘the archive’, from which they were then tasked to create an ‘anti-archive.’5
I explored the dimensions, symbols, and feelings of ‘the archive’ because the topic of my study was the reuse of oral histories. Oral history is, as Lynn Abrams writes, “a creative, interactive methodology hat forces us to get to grips with many layers of meaning and interpretation contained within people’s memories.”6 The multiple dimensions and narratives found in oral histories make them a challenge to archive and navigate, and so it is frequently suggested they are not reused once archived.7 This is not completely true as there are writers who have used archived oral histories as a source for their books on popular historical periods such as the First and Second World War.8 Nevertheless, I know navigating and searching oral history recordings is challenging and does take up a lot of time. The initial aim of this project was to seek a solution to the problem of oral history; to design something that will make reusing oral histories easier – something that would embody all the positive feelings I had of the archive.
My artistic interpretation of the feeling of using an archive. The drawing was used as the front cover for my project update report titled ‘No Man’s Land’.
OHD_DRW_0001 and OHD_RPT_0134
Break the Archive workshop: Archive and the Anti-Archive OHD_WKS_0131
However, things changed when I started to enter the world of archives and was confronted with reality. I talked to an archivist who told me she was currently spending more time managing leaks in the building than archiving. I also did three placements which granted me access to the day-to-day of a heritage site and two archives. The heritage site was Seaton Delaval Hall in Northumberland, England, belongs to the National Trust, Europe’s biggest conservation charity, which also was my case study.9 I worked at the Archives at National Centre for Biological Science (NCBS) in Bangalore, India for two months10 and the British Library for one intense month.11 Throughout my project and placements I did boring work, but work that was essential, crucial to its respective organisations, and, eventually, the central focus of this portfolio. I did not study ‘the archive’ but archives, museums, and heritage sites which collect and maintain our history, and above all maintain access to said history. I did not design a solution to the problem of oral history reuse, instead I researched the maintenance of oral history access through a design practice which filled four years of study and this portfolio.
My research practice was research through design, one of the deployments of design Christopher Frayling discussed in his seminal paper, Research in Art and Design.12 I used design methods to research the situation of oral history access and its maintenance, specifically action research. I created design artefacts which would either explore or explain the situation and use these artefacts as probes in conversations with people working inside the situation, such as the staff and volunteers of my placements organisations. These conversations were essential as they helped uncover the invisible parts of maintenance.
One of the fundamental features of maintenance is its invisibility. Its output is invisible because it keeps a status-quo. As Stewart Brand writes in, How buildings learn: what happens after they’re built, “the only satisfaction they [maintenance people] can get from their work is to do it well. The measure of success in their labors is that the result is invisible, unnoticed. Thanks to them, everything is the same as it even was.”13 The workers and their systems are invisible because they are removed from public view: wires and pipes are hidden above and under ground and the workers work outside of office hours, creating what Star and Strauss refer to as a ‘non-person.’14 Maintenance can even become invisible to those completing the maintenance tasks this is because as Star writes, the tasks do not need to be “reinvented each time or assembled for each task,” therefore they become strangely passive activities which are transparent and “naturalised” as part of the structure, and are simply taken-for-granted.15
By completing these placements I was able to get a closer look at the maintenance and those who maintain, allowing me to slowly map out what is required to maintain access to oral histories and what hinders this maintenance. For my placement at Seaton Delaval Hall I designed the entire system for an on-site Research Room,16 but I also would sometimes have to manage the carpark or do room guiding because they were short on volunteers. I audited the National Trust’s 1700 items strong sound collection at the British Library, looking for copyright forms and noting their absence or presence in a spreadsheet.17 I learnt as much as I could about copyright and data protection to write a takedown policy as part of my placement with Archives at NCBS.18 I also spent three years collecting oral history testimonies for Seaton Delaval Hall, summarising them and preparing them for archiving, including creating a copyright agreement from scratch.19 The work I did during these placements, the discussions I had with my colleagues, and my overall experience of recording oral history make up this portfolio of practice.
This portfolio is a product of my thinking. In Wicked Problems in Design Thinking Richard Buchanan says “designers conceive their subject matter in two ways on two levels: general and particular.”20 These two levels of thinking are present in the portfolio as I consider it a “domain of design”, to borrow a term from Willian Gaver. A domain of design is a space where the designer (myself) presents their general philosophy of a particular situation, issue, or problem, by bringing together their individually created design artefacts and comparing and contrasting them, and putting them in relation to existing theories and ideas.21
The overall idea presented in this portfolio or domain of design should function as a source of inspiration for others who are grappling with a similar issue of maintaining access to oral histories. In some part the portfolio is purposefully ambiguous. It “sets the scene”, as Gaver writes, “but doesn’t prescribe the result”.22 This is done on purpose because the maintaining of oral history access I have framed as a ‘wicked problem’.
A wicked problem is a term formally established by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber’s 1973 paper, Dilemmas in a general theory of planning, referring to modern societal problems that are difficult to define due to their multidimensional and dynamic nature.23 One of the properties of wicked problems is that, “every wicked problem is essentially unique.”24 The ambiguity is present in this portfolio in an effort to accommodate the uniqueness of every version of maintaining access to oral histories. The particulars of the individual design artefacts might not be applicable to every situation but the general idea shown in the portfolio/domain of design might inspire new ways of thinking; pushing the audience to interpret their own situation and engage with it in a deeper and more personal manner.
Although I have consciously kept my portfolio ambiguous in places, this portfolio still needs to be considered one of many perspectives there are on the issue of oral histories access. As in their paper Rittel and Webber write, “the information needed to understand the problem depends upon one’s idea for solving it.”25 Dorst and Cross observed this phenomenon when they studied design students’ approach to a particular design challenge. They observed a diverse array of interpretations depending on what the students thought the solution might be.26 My ability to describe the situation surrounding the access of oral histories is directed by my belief that the opportunities to improve access to oral histories lie within maintenance. Since I am a single human it is not possible for me to perceive ‘all conceivable solutions,’ therefore what I am articulating cannot be considered a ‘definitive formulation.’ Nevertheless, I hope to contribute a novel perspective to the conversation surrounding the access and reuse of oral histories by heeding Star’s call to investigate ‘boring’ and focusing on the ‘symbolic sewers’ of archives and similar repositories, namely, the standards, forms, and storage procedures.
In order to create some order in the chaos of a design process this portfolio has been divided into three sections: the practice, the wicked problem, and the case study.
My practice explains how I approached this project, why I focussed on maintenance, and unpacks how my focus on maintenance shaped this project into a form of research through design, using action research as my main methodology. Action research (AR) is a research ‘strategy’ merging together: research, action, and participation.27 AR seeks to be democratic, by being “a situated process” where the local people are not “passive recipients (subjects) of the research process” but “active participants” in the project.28 AR positioned me not as the expert designer but the friendly outsider, the reflective practitioner, a willing participant of the community I am working in. My intention with this part of the portfolio is to inspire a mode of practice which is open, reflective and inclusive to all those who touch the situation in question.
This section illustrates the various dimensions of the wicked problem that is maintaining access to oral histories I observed in the institutions I worked in. This part of the portfolio aims to map the wicked nature of maintaining access to oral histories by viewing it from two perspectives. The first is what needs to be maintained focussing on the evolution of technology and how this has changed society’s idea of access therefore creating a demand for new structures which need new forms of maintenance. The second perspective discusses why in many circumstances this maintenance does not occur as the status of maintenance, the ability to maintain, and diminishing resources hinder the capacity to maintain.
The case study presents the wicked problem of maintaining access to oral histories within the context of the National Trust and Seaton Delaval Hall. It includes the outputs I created to support the staff and volunteers of the organisation in improving and maintaining access to their oral history. However, it is again essential to remember Rittel and Webber’s seventh property of a wicked problem – “every wicked problem is essentially unique.”29 While the other two sections offer a more general perspective on the situation of access to oral history and how this should be managed, this section offers a specific example, so I again emphasise this case study is an example not a prescription.
Susan Leigh Star, “The ethnography of infrastructure” in American behavioral scientist, 43(3), (1999), p. 377. ↩︎
Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London, Routledge, 2016), p. 18. ↩︎
Michael Frisch, “Three Dimensions and More” in Handbook of Emergent Methods, ed. Sharlene Nagy Hesser-Biber and Patricia Leavy (New York, The Guilford Press, 2010), p. 223. ↩︎
See the Forgotten Voices of… series (here is a Waterstones search result [ACCESSED: 3rd January 2025]) ↩︎
Christopher Frayling, “Research in art and design” in Royal College of Art Research Papers, 1(1), (1993/4) ↩︎
Stewart Brand, How buildings learn: what happens after they’re built. (New York, Penguin, 1995), p. 130 ↩︎
Susan Leigh Star and Anselm Strauss, “Layers of silence, arenas of voice: The ecology of visible and invisible work” in Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), 8(1), (The Netherlands, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), p. 15. ↩︎
Susan Leigh Star, “The ethnography of infrastructure” in American behavioral scientist, 43(3), (1999), p. 381. ↩︎
Richard Buchanan, “Wicked problems in design thinking: in Design issues, 8(2), (1992), p. 17 ↩︎
William Gaver, “What should we expect from research through design?” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing system. (2012, May) p. 945 ↩︎
William Gaver, Jacob Beaver, and Steve Benford, “Ambiguity as a resource for design” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (2003, April), p. 233. ↩︎
Horst Rittel, and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a general theory of planning” in Policy sciences, 4(2), (1973), pp.155-169. ↩︎
Horst Rittel, and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a general theory of planning” in Policy sciences, 4(2), (1973), p. 164. ↩︎
Horst Rittel, and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a general theory of planning” in Policy sciences, 4(2), (1973), p. 161. ↩︎
Kees Dorst, and Nigel Cross, “Creativity in the design process: co-evolution of problem–solution” in Design Studies, 22(5), p. 431 ↩︎
Davydd Greenwood, and Morten Levin, Introduction to Action Research 2nd Edition: Social Research for Social Change, (Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications, 2007), p. 2.; Davydd Greenwood, and Morten Levin, Introduction to Action Research: Social Research for Social Change, (Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications, 1998), p. 6. ↩︎
Davydd Greenwood, and Morten Levin, Introduction to Action Research 2nd Edition: Social Research for Social Change, (Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications, 2007), p. 75.; Robert Sommer, and Berbara Baker Sommer, A Practical Guide to Behavioral Research : Tools and Techniques. 5th ed., (New York , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 212. ↩︎
Horst Rittel, and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a general theory of planning” in Policy sciences, 4(2), (1973), p. 164. ↩︎
