Designing a Counter: The Constitutive Entanglement of the Social and the Material in Architectural Design

The relationship between the design and construction of architectural objects — the material — and the social context in which these objects are shaped and used — the social — is a key issue within the sociology of architecture. The relationship between the material and the social is contested: some tend to reify one, be it the material or the social, at the expense of the other, whereas others consider the material and the social to be ‘constitutively entangled’ (Orlikowski 2007:1437). In keeping with the latter perspective, we investigate the recursive interplay between the material and the social in the context of a design process that involved both architectural and organizational design. Particular emphasis is given to how extensive user participation was brought to bear in developing the architectural design and the implications of this for the users’ sense of their work and organization, as well as for the architectural designers’ sense of their professional practice.