Reviewer: A

1) Is the subject matter relevant?

Yes, I believe the subject matter is relevant to the contemporary debate on the interaction designer profession.

2) Is the treatment of the subject matter intellectually interesting? Are there citations or bodies of literature you think are essential to which the author has not referred?

The subject matter is interesting and timely.

Osvaldo’s idea of a community design Master is well-known since the rise of Participatory Design in the 70s, and Public Design and Community-based Design in the last decade (Participatory design handbook, Simonsen and Roberts), yet the foundational conditions are different. In these fields, working with communities is a political act rather than a job market demand. It might be interesting for the author to reflect on these two different approaches and the socio-economic implications they might have. Referring to previous publications of the Journal of Peer Production, could help the author to push further her analysis.

3) Are there any noticeable problems with the author’s means of validating assumptions or making judgments?

I remain puzzled about what the author means by flexible skills/practical skills/social skills. Developing empathy with the users or the participants of a project is a social skill, yet this doesn’t look like important from the fieldnotes, until Osvaldo comes up with the idea of a Community Design Master. Before that, the ethnographic account reports only episodes where the concept of social skills is referred to do networking with the right people that can eventually offer further (working) opportunities (e.g.: Silverio’s refusal to attend the Confindustria party; Osvaldo’s idea to bring “guru” designers to teach at the new design school, in order to establish a “system of relationships”). Before that, neither users, nor participants, or communities have ever mentioned as actors involved in this social skills mindset. I would like to understand if this has been an evolution in Osvaldo’s thinking, maybe influenced by the author, or if this has always been the framework within the ethnographic account was unfolding.

4) Is the article well written?

The article would strongly benefit from proofreading and a general revision of the structure of the paragraphs (paragraphs and sub-paragraphs need to be numbered).

5) Are there portions of the article that you recommend be shortened, excised or expanded?

Since this article aims at being an ethnographic description, the author’s argument would become much more effective by: having informants’ direct quotes instead of paraphrasis, adding author’s self-reflections about her role as researcher and, her positioning in respect of the people she works with and the projects she is involved. For example, I feel missing a critical author’s view of the narrative of opportunities that the gig economy arises.

At page 14, it’s mentioned “Stefano’s performativity of ‘practical skills’ in design”, but it’s the first and only time he’s mentioned. Who is him?

Finally, in the paper, many complex concepts are put in play, but they are explained only very briefly. I would suggest to better present them. This is the case for example of: designers’ design-centred conception of creativity and innovation, by Gaspar (p.3); para-ethnographic point of view (p.6); speculative pragmatism (p.8).

Reviewer: B

In this article, the authors present an ethnographic account of Osvaldo – a director of a design studio and design department at an arts academy in Milan – and a number of other characters of the local design community. The narrative centers around how these individuals experience and embody ‘flexible skills’, which the authors describe as a reimagination of the competences that were previously required of designers, and how those experiences relate to recent global economic developments.

1) Is the subject matter relevant?

The subject at large, absolutely. The European economies have been going through a transformation from industrial to post-industrial – i.e., from manufacturing goods, to providing knowledge and services – for over half a century, but the Great Recession of 2008 and the platformisation of labour have reconfigured employment relations in the European Union to favour flexibility. How those changes affect individuals – in working conditions, social relations, and social security – is still an incomplete picture.

The subject matter is a little less relevant for this particular issue of Peer Production, however, as it does not touch on ICT or the commons.

2) Is the treatment of the subject matter intellectually interesting? Are there citations or bodies of literature you think are essential to which the author has not referred?

Overall, the authors do an admirable job tying their discussion into seminal works from Sociology, Anthropology, and STS scholars (e.g., Ingold, Bauman, Sennett, Law). However, strangely absent from the entire article is any discussion of non-standard employment and the wealth of research around this concept. Non-standard employment refers to work performed under short-term, flexible, project-based contracts and it is defined in opposition to standard employment, which refers to full-time, permament, open-ended contracts. Non-standard employment has risen steadily over the past 20 years across the EU (although unevenly among Member States) as a result of technological change making these kinds of employment relations more feasible (through, for example, platform work) but also as a result of specific policies implemented by neoliberal governments to help employers deal with fluctuating and unpredictable labour demands (as a result of fluctuating and unpredictable global market trends), but ostensibly also to give workers more flexible working schedules to better fit with their preferences (for a recent, comprehensive overview of these developments and the research around its consequences, see the “OECD Input to the Netherlands Independent Commission on the Regulation of Work”). “Flexibility” is at the heart of this alternative model of employment, although some would prefer to conceptualise it as “precarity” (see e.g., Mrozowicki, 2016).

In this article, the authors discuss these changes through the lens of the “flexible skills”, which is an interesting and understandable approach, even if it does decontextualise where these new requirements came from. Of course new ways of working require new skills, and it seems these new skills are what the authors focus on here. However, it feels like the authors often conflrate flexible skills and flexible employment relations, making some of the examples of flexible skills a bit akward (e.g., moving abroad for job opportunities, doing project based work). For sure they overlap, but a crisper delineation between the two and an explicit acknowledgement of non- standard work and the literature around it would improve this article.

As a minor comment, the authors sometimes off-handedly mention (neoliberal) capitalism as the reason behind experiences or behaviour of their informants, which feels a bit like naming a vague boogeyman since the authors do not concretely define or delimit the concept (e.g., “the volatility and the predicament of new capitalist life”). There are a huge number of different flavours of capitalism across the world and given the fact that this article deals specifically with Italian/European experiences, it would make the article stronger if the authors refer to the economic model of a more specific place or instead just mention the characteristic the authors want to focus on.

3) Are there any noticeable problems with the author’s means of validating assumptions or making judgments?

No, I think the authors have done an admirable amount of data collection and organised it in a coherent narrative. The discussion of the lived experience of the designers appears well grounded, and the discussion of this data in relation to more abstract theories and concepts is sound. The only times their statements feel essentialist and overgeneralised are when they discuss “designers”. Their phrasing makes it seem like there is a definitive and unified way of doing design: “designers’ design-centred conception of creativity and innovation”, “[t]he designers’ creative process comes rather from within mental processes rather than from without”. Most problematically, the authors misinterpret the Bauhaus mantra form follows function, which they describe as emphasising “the conceptual and the fictional rather than the functional”, when of course it does exactly the opposite.

4) Is the article well written?

There is a clear story-line that is easy and pleasant to follow, and the different characters in the narrative are evocative and lively. However, even after multiple close readings, I still struggle with pulling out the exact key points the authors are trying to make throughout the article. The different sections seem to meander between multiple conceptual arguments rather than focus on just one; the same points about flexibility and the way it affects work are repeated across sections making the unique points made in each stand out less, and the section headings do not always clearly or effectively describe the content of the section. For example, the heading “Putting things in operation: ‘practice’ as a para-ethnographic concept” seems to indicate that practice as a para- ethnographic is the main argument of the section, but this is only really explicitly mentioned in a couple of sentences towards the end of the section. Similarly, the section titled ‘social skills and temporality’ hardly mentions temporal aspects beyond the beginning of the section, and ‘potentiality’ seems to better describe the content of the rest. The authors also reflect on how the subject matter affects how they should study it, but these reflections are made in the middle of paragraphs that are trying to make other arguments rather than clearly separated and given their own paragraph towards the end of a section. These things make it hard for the contributions the authors make to really shine and for the reader to point at a section and summarise/reference its main point.

5) Are there portions of the article that you recommend be shortened, excised or expanded?

The abstact and introduction briefly mention how ‘flexible skills’ affect how designers ‘design their life’, but is not discussed very explicitly anywhere else in the article. I suggest either expanding on it (I would love to hear more about it) or otherwise leave it out. I am a bit ambivalent about the methodological reflections.

References

Mrozowicki, A. (2016). Normalisation of precariousness? Biographical experiences of young workers in the flexible forms of employment in Poland. Przegląd Socjologii Jakościowej, 12(2), 94- 112.