The Circuit of Culture and D/discourse Analysis for

Design Research

Dr Gavin Melles

Faculty of Design

gmelles@swin.edu.au

Overview The Circuit of Culture model describes the five interrelated

perspectives from which we can examine the processes of production, interpretation, and use of cultural artifacts

Marketing, Advertising, Design act as cultural intermediaries in the circuit of culture articulating different ‘players’ together and encoding meanings about lifestyles etc., into objects

D/discourse analysis allows us to examine how language and material objects work together to produce the discourses/lifestyles we inhabit which define who we are or want to be

Combining the circuit of culture model with D/discourse analysis brings social and cultural theory together with empirical discourse analysis, which is relevant to design

Circuit of Culture The Circuit of Culture is a theory or framework that suggests that in

studying a cultural text or artifact you must look at its representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation.

Du gay et al. (1997) suggest that taken together (these 5 points) complete a sort of circuit… through which any analysis of a cultural text… must pass if it is to be adequately studied (p.3).

The framework has been applied and extended to examining Napster (Taylor, Demont-Heinrich, Broadfoot, Dodge, & Jian, 2002). Gerard Goggin (2006) uses this framework in his book ‘Cell Phone Culture: Mobile technology in everyday life’ in order to fully understand the cell phone as a cultural artefact. His book is split into four parts—production, consumption, regulation and representation and identity (through looking at mobile convergences).

The framework is not without its critics and has been called ‘little more than metaphor’ (Fine, 2002, p.106).

Significance of circuit of culture and discourse analysis for design work The meanings of any cultural artifact can be examined from five

different angles: identity, production, consumption, regulation, and representation.

This circuit of culture is a useful metaphor and heuristic for understanding the multiple values and meanings of any object.

Designers have a key role in articulating the meanings of new objects as they are cultural intermediaries who attempt to encode objects with meanings so that individuals choose such objects as emblematic of lifestyles

People use material objects (clothes, watches, cars) together with what they say and do to project certain identities they want others to recognize they have (i.e. to be in the Discourse).

Discourse analysis allows designers to examine the present and articulate the future according to their particular purposes.

Representation (& identity) Practice of constructing meaning through the use of signs and

language, principally through the language of advertising which ‘must engage with the meanings the product has accumulated and it must try to construct an identification between us – the consumers and those meanings (du Gay et al. 1997, p.25)

Representation is the discursive process by which cultural meaning is generated and given shape: “we give things meaning by how we represent them” (S. Hall, 1997b, p. 3). As such, meaning is not static or inherent in representations but is socially constructed through symbolic systems, or discourse; (Curtin & Gaither 2005, p.99)

Graphic design involved in representation, Japanese technical sophistication emphasized, youth, sex, gender, lifestyling and identity aspirations

Representation & identity

Production (& Consumption) Different accounts offered of the story of production, heroic individuals (Akio

Morita), happy accident, Sony: signifying Japan but transcultural and hybrid For Walkman to have meaning it has to be bought and used (consumption

practices) Marketing and public relations engage in initial and ongoing evaluation to

feedback to advertising and design Designer acts as cultural mediator (and in the story of Sony has a high status

function in the organization) lifestyling the product to customer niches Production pursued on the basis of a particular imagined customer Production lead by mostly male managers leading a cheap female assembly

line (gender) Although production processes take place at a number of levels (i.e., individual

talent, the organizational culture, and circumstantial happenstance), organizational culture probably plays the largest role because production is most often dictated by corporate constraints and cultures (Curtin & Gaither 2005, p.100)

Production & Consumption

Designer as cultural intermediary To make artifacts sell … designers have to embody culture in the

things they design. Designed artifacts are certainly there to do something, they are often functional (for playing tapes for instance); but more than this, they are inscribed with meanings as well as uses.

Designers are key cultural intermediaries, to use the terminology of cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu (1984). By the term ‘cultural intermediaries’ Bourdieu is referring to that increasingly important group of workers who play an active role in promoting consumption through attaching to products and services particular meanings and lifestyles with which consumers will identify.

In their symbolic work of making products ‘meaningful’, designers are a key link in our cultural circuit; for amongst many other things, they articulate production and the world of engineers with the market and consumers.

Consumption Although objects are encoded with meaning during their production,

the process of production is never fully realized until the moment of consumption: “the processes of production only provide a series of possibilities that have to be realized in and through consumption” (du Gay et al., 1997, p. 59).

Because meaning does not reside in an object but in how that object is used (Baudrillard, 1988), the meanings encoded during production are but one set that may be articulated through consumption ((Curtin & Gaither 2005, p.101)

Mobile Phones, Internet used for resistance and consumers are not cultural dupes

Consumption practices used for social differentiation (Bourdieu 1984 Distinction) but needs observational – ethnographic and other methods to explore how subcultures appropriate objects for identity

Regulation The moment of regulation

encompasses the attempt to control cultural activity, from the formal or legal controls of technological infrastructures, regulatory bodies, and institutionalized educational systems to the informal or local controls of cultural norms and expectations.

In the Walkman and other cases focuses on the shifting relationship between private /public worlds and utopian and dystopian visions

Regulation linked to consumption as people interpret the object and to production as this responds to norms and values, e.g. smaller headphones

D/discourse Analysis

Every moment in the interdependent cycle of relationships in the circuit of culture is susceptible to treatment using D/discourse analysis

Designed objects, and objects in general are critical to being recognized or identified

When ‘little d’ discourse (language-in-use) is melded integrally with non-language ‘stuff’ to enact specific identities and activities, then I say that ‘big D’ Discourses are involved.

Discourse and identity We are all members of many, a great

many, different Discourses …When you ‘pull off’ being a culturally specific sort of ‘everyday’ person, a ‘regular’ at the local bar, a certain type of African-American or Greek-Australian, a certain type of cutting-edge particle physicist or teenage heavy-metal enthusiast, a teacher or a student of a certain sort … you use language and ‘other stuff’ – ways of acting, interacting, feeling, believing, valuing, and using various sorts of objects, symbols, tools, and technologies – to recognize yourself and others as meaning and meaningful in certain ways (Gee 2005, p.7)

Seven building tasks in discourse analysis1. Material significance – How is this language being used to

make certain things significant or not and in what ways?2. Activities – What activity or activities is language being used

to enact?3. Identities – What identities is this language enacting?4. Relationships – What sort of relationships are being

(re)produced here?5. Politics (ideology) – What is being communicated about what

is good, right, valued etc., here?6. Connections – How am I connecting this to what was said

and done previously?7. Semiotics – I can talk and act to make certain symbol

systems, eg. legal language, street jargon, more important than everyday language in out discussions?

Five tools of inquiry Situated meanings are meanings in context and in

relation to cultural models, i.e. not dictionary meanings Cultural models are socioculturally differentiated

approaches to life, e.g. parenting, prevalent in particualr subcultures (those which advertising privileges)

Social languages are distinctive choices of grammar and vocabulary that identify you, e.g. active/passive voice, jargon, etc.

Discourses are the material addition (behaviour, clothes, etc) to discourses which produce identities and the world

Conversations are historically significant debates about Discourses, e.g. discourses about migrants, schooling

Some fieldwork: What does it all mean? Consider some particular designed artifact – I pod,

website … Examine dimensions of the circuit of meaning with its

inter-relations in relation to this Decide which particular dimension is of interest to you Observe, record, analyse what D/discourses are

relevant, beginning with situated meanings Expand your analysis to confirm some of your

hypotheses Resources:

http://www.2collab.com/group:Circuit of Culture Intermediary

Further Reading Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction : a social critique of the judgement of taste.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Curtin, P. A., & Gaither, T. K. (2005). Privileging Identity, Difference, and

Power: The Circuit of Culture As a Basis for Public Relations Theory. Journal of Public Relations Research, 17(2), 91-115.

Julier, Guy (2007). The Culture of Design. 2nd Ed. London. Sage Du Gay, P., Hall, S., Janes, L., Mackay, H., & Negus, K. (1997). Doing cultural

studies : the story of the Sony Walkman. London: Sage Publications in association with the Open University.

Fine, B. (2002). World of Consumption : The Material and Cultural Revisited (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.

Gee, J. (2005). Introduction to Discourse Analysis. 2nd Ed. New York: Routledge.

Goggin, G. (2006). Cell phone culture : mobile technology in everyday life. New York, NY: Routledge.

Taylor, B. C., Demont-Heinrich, C., Broadfoot, K. J., Dodge, J., & Jian, C. (2002). New Media and the Circuit of Cyber-Culture: Conceptualizing Napster. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 46(4), 607-629.