Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology by William C. Kirlinkus

Reviewed by: Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology by William C. Kirlinkus Logan Blizzard William C. Kirlinkus, Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 262 pp. ISBN: 9780822965527 William Kirlinkus’ Nostalgic Design poses a central question: “What are you nostalgic for, why, and to which ends?” (4, 21). Nostalgia has a bad reputation in contemporary discourse, central as it has been to recent conservative movements, like the propagandistic, restorative nostalgia of “Make America Great Again.” This conflation has allowed progressives and critics to dismiss nostalgia as purely regressive and/or nationalistic, which “simply relieves critics of the responsibility of understanding an ‘illogical’ group . . . [and] blinds [them] to their own nostalgic impulses” (29). But the truth is that we are all nostalgic for something, insofar as the futures we imagine are necessarily shaped by what we value from the past. What is needed, and what Kirlinkus offers throughout the book, is a means to negotiate multiple, conflicting nostalgias, and put their affective force to constructive, democratic, and inclusive ends. By reframing nostalgia, Kirlinkus articulates nostalgic design, “a perspective and method” for engaging with competing nostalgias and incorporating these into the design of technology. The inherent rhetoricity of design—defined broadly as “the methods by which expert makers create some technology to be operated by a specific user, in a specific context, in order to ‘change existing situations into preferred ones’”—has long been acknowledged by theorists like Richard Buchanan and Donald Norman, and often aligns with the future- orientation of the dominant technological paradigm (or “techno-logic”). Nostalgia, here defined as “pride and longing for lost or threatened personally or culturally experienced pasts” (6), would seem more closely aligned with another rhetorical process: memory. By recognizing that technology is far more historically-oriented than designers tend to admit (given that users tend to understand the new only through the old), nostalgic design posits nostalgia as powerful, largely-untapped resource for designers of all types, from graphic designers to medical professionals. As Kirlinkus argues, to overcome the tendency of tech design to neglect entire social groups, we must take seriously the memories, experiences, and concerns of a wide spectrum of users, and incorporate these into the very process of design. Much of the book is devoted to putting nostalgic design into practice, as a method. Kirlinkus frames the approach as a three-step process: identifying [End Page 464] exclusionary designs, mediating technological conflicts, and, ultimately, designing meaningful products (24). Perhaps due to the readily-apparent nature of exclusions in technology, the only real consideration of this first step comes in Chapter 2, which examines several cases of “critical nostos” (51), of amateurism functioning as resistance. Instead, the primary concern of Nostalgic Design is navigating the wildly divergent visions and values held by users and designers. In this way, the project runs into one of the defining questions for deliberative democracy: how to incorporate a plurality of opinions, needs, and values in a manner that is at once equitable and agonistic. The third chapter, one of the book’s strongest, engages with these concerns directly; setting four prominent theories of deliberative rhetoric—Aristotelian audience analysis, Burkean identification, Ratcliffe’s rhetorical listening, and Mouffe’s agonism—alongside corresponding models of deliberative design. This juxtaposition highlights the shortcomings of previous, well-meaning attempts at inclusive design, such as the patronizing efforts of “user-centered design,” or the tendency of “empathic design” to sideline designer expertise. Chapters 5 and 6 turn to the final step in the process, explicating meaningful design. Returning to the pseudo-oral history method from the second chapter, Kirlinkus focuses squarely on design praxis, bringing in accounts of real designers who have developed productive relationships with user nostalgia. This approach is of particular use in Chapter 5, which poses the interactions between designers and clients as a potential conflict between the designer’s expert knowledge (techne) and the client’s experience (metis). The correlation between rhetorical communication and design professions truly shines in this discussion, as the process of adapting, adopting, or refusing feedback requires careful attention to knowledge boundaries and productive opposition—in short, the skills of the rhetorician. The project culminates with a...

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