Knowledge of ideas: On design and the politics of relevance in concept development work.

The paper examines the emergent nature of how ideas and problem issues are handled in the organisational processes of project work in design. It addresses the knowledge practices entailed in the (re)association of past projects or activities within a project with ongoing ones (the idea of knowledge reuse). This is pursued from the standpoint of the particular and partial framings of knowledge, as localised and situated in character and enactment, through its socio-material ordering and mediation in heterogeneous networks of relations. Network building processes and the drawing of relevance play important roles in the selection of ideas for conceptualization and synthesis work in such projects – they at once open up and enable, while also delimit and constrain, the design space in which practitioners may engage their insight and skills. The study explores the translation of knowledge practices and the politics of relevance entailed herein, through the idea of material politics – the re-presentation of knowledge, and the implication this holds for (the politics of) reuse. Rendering insights relevant in new network configurations entails more than the delimitation of particular semblances between past problems and solutions to the undertakings of the present. The displacement, or translation, entailed, is about making similarities and differences work productively, despite such tensions. Drawing on this idea, the paper elaborates on the relevance in design as to the reciprocal notions of knowledge and insight of organization and the organization of knowledge and insight.