Assemblage of art, discourse and ice hockey: Designing knowledge about work

Abstract

This article examines speculative design's capacity to co-produce knowledge about contradictions and potentialities of work in professional ice hockey. Building on the Deleuzian concept of assemblage, speculative design has been used for two purposes: (a) to bring together the perspectives of art, anthropology, discourse studies, and professional sports in co-constructing knowledge about hockey work; and (b) to analyze and present the key findings of an ethnography on hockey work through an art exhibition of speculative hockey memorabilia. As such, these art pieces showed the intertwined relationships of material, discursive, and affective aspects in hockey work as well as the multiplicity of aspirations, challenges, investments, and risks that go into this kind of mobile, unpredictable work. The design process also showed how knowledge production is an emergent process of exchange, dependent on interactions and relationships, and embedded in power relations.