Otherwising or Attaching? Play, Care, and Critique in Interdisciplinary Public Engagement

This article builds on the affective turn in Science and Technology Studies (STS) analyses of public engagement with science to explore the tension between epistemological interrogation and social and political transformation. The empirical basis for this exploration is a year-long interdisciplinary public engagement project about routine data use in critical care. Partly conceived as a form of “otherwising” in relation both to determinist tropes of health data and reductionist forms of patient and public involvement in health research, the project sought to open up dialogue and debate using design-led methods, namely cultural probes. Widely regarded as a success, the project was, however, less subversive than originally envisaged, in spite of its commitment to playful and speculative processes. In order to explain this, we draw on feminist STS literature on the inseparability of knowledge and care, where care is conceived as a form of mutually transformative relating between beings—or attaching. Interdisciplinary collaboration, we suggest, was an effect of attaching, enabled by our methodological orientation to play. We show how playfulness as a mode of otherwising goes beyond the hollow critique of critical constructivism and fosters caring relations, both toward the objects of science and between scientists, clinicians, sociologists, and designers.