De-Signing Ambiguity
This paper challenges the way ambiguity is made understandable in William W. Gaver, Jacob Beaver, and Steve Benford’s well known disambiguation of ambiguity Ambiguity as a Resource for Design. Rather than assuming ambiguity to be an epiphenomenal relation between designed artefacts and their users, which seems to be the argument they make, Christian and I instead find ambiguity to exist firstly, and at a higher intensity, in the primordial moments of design practices.
As such, we propose that ambiguity is primarily a condition of the not-yet-designed artefact. As such, we claim that all things in the world are inherently ambiguous, and secondly we prioritise the role of ambiguity in the process of designing.
Co-authored with and photography by Christian Skovgaard Petersen.
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bd2e830eb3fed857554de9e956095d43f403c3c562150ba728bc5d110eabdb43/Close-up-of-Fyodor-Santsons-model-in-Narva-Art-Gallery-Dyer-Petersen.png)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7498d94390d89350ea47df5138d327d623a7cca1f83607969eba1b8326501845/Fyodor-Santsons-work-station--Dyer--Petersen.png)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bef7dccb778a354500eac196a723b43061104134aa3870031c6a651ae99ea821/Fyodor-Santson-in-his-workshop-Dyer--Petersen.png)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1ed5dbf2cde5e74e1016560195631b9b126396585eebb574b460134140361cb5/Close-up-of-model-in-Fyodor-Santsons-workshop-Dyer-Petersen.png)