Walter Ong once proposed that writers don’t address real audiences — they address fictions of them, constructed in the act of writing itself. To communicate at all, Ong argued, the writer must fictionalize the reader: imagine a listener, position them, calibrate the message accordingly. It’s a discomfiting idea if you sit with it. It implies that every act of communication is already a kind of staging — not dishonesty, but a recognition that meaning is relational, situational, and always already shaped by who we imagine is receiving it.
Erving Goffman would have agreed, and gone further. His dramaturgical account of social life — laid out in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) — distinguishes front stage behaviour (performed for an audience, shaped by social expectation) from backstage behaviour (where the mask loosens, where colleagues speak candidly, where the real working conversation happens). What Goffman understood, and what his critics sometimes flatten, is that the backstage is not more authentic than the front — it’s differently staged, calibrated to a different audience. The debrief with the crew is its own kind of performance. What you’d say freely to the other stagehands shifts — sometimes dramatically — in the earshot of a director, producer, or patron. That shift isn’t hypocrisy. It’s social intelligence, or its absence.
The interesting question, then, isn’t which register is “real.” It’s whether we’re conscious of which one we’re in — and who might be listening.
Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges adds a further valence. All perspective is partial, located, embodied; the view from nowhere is a fantasy, and a politically convenient one. What Haraway asks of us is not neutrality but accountability to position — knowing where we’re speaking from, and being willing to say so. In design contexts, this means something specific. A designer’s contribution to a room — what they say about their own work, about a colleague’s, about a process or a structure — arrives already positioned, already heard as coming from somewhere. The question is whether the speaker knows this, or acts as though they don’t.
This is where design politics becomes unavoidable. Richard Buchanan’s early work on the rhetoric of design made explicit what practitioners sometimes prefer to leave tacit: design communication is always, in the small-p sense, political. It produces effects. It positions people. Cameron Tonkinwise, writing more pointedly about design’s institutional cultures, has pushed this further — the way designers talk about their work, about others’ work, about the field itself, is not separable from design practice. It is practice. It shapes what gets valued, resourced, and done. Lucy Kimbell, approaching this from service design’s interest in relational complexity, extends the point: design artefacts and design conversations alike are constitutive, not merely descriptive. The room you speak in is also the room you’re designing, whether you intend to or not.
For learning designers, this matters in ways that are easy to underestimate. We operate in institutional contexts where the “room” shifts constantly — a team workshop, a unit-wide meeting, a conversation with an academic lead, a post on a shared channel. The backstage crew is not always backstage. The director occasionally reads the call sheet.
None of this argues for performance over contribution. Quite the opposite. The most durable form of professional presence — in the literature and, frankly, in the colleagues I’ve learned most from — is something closer to a conscious honesty: knowing your room, knowing your position, knowing who’s listening, and choosing to say something true anyway. Not in spite of that awareness, but informed by it. Vulnerability that knows itself isn’t naivety. And the contribution that performs openness while protecting itself from scrutiny is usually visible to anyone paying attention.
The craft, as ever, is in the calibration.
Buchanan, R. (1985). Declaration by design: Rhetoric, argument, and demonstration in design practice. Design Issues, 2(1), 4–22.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599.
Kimbell, L. (2011). Rethinking design thinking: Part I. Design and Culture, 3(3), 285–306.
Ong, W. J. (1975). The writer’s audience is always a fiction. PMLA, 90(1), 9–21.