In an earlier post, I discussed Gedenryd's (1998) identification of a fundamental discrepancy in design methodology: the gap between "the received, theoretical views of how things ought to work, and how they have turned out to work in reality - a gap between the ideal and the actual". I added a bracketed interpolation to that quote which I want to develop here. The design literature has discussed reification in several registers - Wenger's participation/reification duality in participatory design (Ehn, 2008), the hardening of theory into fixed method (Blackwell, 2007; Seitz, 2019) - but the specific mechanism by which design understanding must be simplified to function as political and bureaucratic discourse has received less direct attention. The interpolation was this - a reflection on: "how [it is exactly that things] need to be simplified to work as discursive or political constructs". The gap, in other words, is not merely between theory and practice. It is partly produced by the very process of making concepts tractable for institutional contexts - by simplifying, hardening, and flattening situated understanding so that it can circulate through programme boards, business cases, and governance frameworks.
This post attempts to ground that intuition theoretically, and in doing so to deepen the critique of service design tools that Tonkinwise (2023) mounts in his SVA lecture "All Care, No Responsibility". Tonkinwise identifies that service design tools conceal labour, miss what he calls "contexts of aggregation", and carry the inheritance of their neoliberal origins. These are sharp observations; what I want to add is the philosophical mechanism that explains why these dynamics are structural rather than accidental. That mechanism is reification - and the literature on how concepts must be transformed to function in political and bureaucratic discourse gives us a precise vocabulary for what Tonkinwise describes.
The story-line mechanism
Hajer (2003), working on environmental policy discourse, offers a concept that maps directly onto what happens to design understanding in programme contexts: the story-line. Story-lines, in Hajer's account, are narratives through which elements from many different domains are combined, providing actors with symbolic references that suggest a common understanding. They are "essential political devices that allow the overcoming of fragmentation and the achievement of discursive closure". His examples are drawn from environmental politics - ten years of atmospheric chemistry research condensed into the slogan "what goes up must come down"; the complex ecology of forest damage reduced to a single graph of longitudinal decline - but the mechanism is general.
The critical move in Hajer's argument is that this translation from complex, contingent knowledge into portable narrative is accompanied by what he calls a "loss of meaning": all uncertainty and conditionality is erased to achieve discursive closure. But - and this is the crucial point - "regulation depends on this loss of meaning and the multi-interpretability of text". The simplification is not a failure of communication or a lamentable distortion of the original research; it is a precondition for institutional action. You cannot govern on the basis of ten years of atmospheric chemistry with all its uncertainty intact. You need the story-line.
This is precisely the mechanism operating in design contexts. A "user need", as it emerges from situated design inquiry, is a complex, contingent, relational understanding: a particular person in a particular context encountering particular constraints, with a history and a set of capabilities and a network of dependencies that shape what "need" means. But a "user need" as it appears in a product backlog or a business case is a story-line - a simplified narrative that allows a programme board to discuss something complex without engaging with its full contingency. The simplification enables governance; it also produces what I want to call the reification gap. The "ideal" in Gedenryd's "gap between the ideal and the actual" was never really the ideal at all; it was a reified version of a more complex understanding that had to be flattened to function institutionally.
Van Hulst and Yanow (2014) complement Hajer by identifying the micro-processes through which this flattening operates. Framing, they argue, involves three acts: sense-making, naming and categorising, and storytelling. "For purposes of communicating about that framing, the features that are selected for attention have to be named"; beyond naming, framing entails "binding together the salient features of the situation into a coherent pattern". These are active choices about what to foreground and what to suppress. Every time a designer translates research findings into a governance-legible format - selecting which insights to name, which to suppress, which to bind together into a "coherent pattern" - they are performing this framing work. The question is whether they recognise it as a political act rather than a neutral act of communication.
Reification: making phenomena appear as things
The sociological concept of reification gives a name and a theoretical history to this process of simplification. Berger and Luckmann (2011) define it as "the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non-human or possibly supra-human terms". The mechanism they describe runs through three stages: externalisation (humans produce social artefacts - institutions, practices, meanings), objectivation (these artefacts come to be experienced as having an existence independent of their human origins), and internalisation (subsequent actors encounter them as simply "the way things are").
Reified phenomena are not illusions; they are genuine social products that have come to appear as something other than what they are. Benefits dashboards really do exist; they really do produce effects; they really do shape organisational behaviour. What is reified is not their existence but their character - their appearance as objective representations of reality rather than as social constructions with particular histories, assumptions, and exclusions built in.
This three-stage process is recognisable in programme contexts at every level, from governance infrastructure down to design's own artefacts.
Consider the RAID log - risks, assumptions, issues, dependencies - that sits at the heart of programme governance. A programme manager externalises a complex organisational anxiety into a row on a spreadsheet: "Risk: low user adoption". The risk is real; the anxiety behind it is real; the institutional dynamics that make adoption uncertain are real. But once the risk is logged, rated, assigned an owner, and given a RAG status, it has been objectivated - it circulates through highlight reports, is reviewed at programme boards, is escalated or de-escalated according to its colour. Subsequent actors encounter it not as someone's situated judgement about a genuinely uncertain situation but as a fact about the programme: there is a risk, it is amber, it has an owner, it is being managed. The RAID log has transformed an irreducible uncertainty into a thing that can be tracked, and in doing so has made the anxiety governable at the cost of making the underlying situation invisible. The programme board can satisfy itself that risks are being managed without ever engaging with the conditions that produced them.
Design's own artefacts undergo the same process, and the persona is the clearest example. A design team conducts user research - interviews, observations, contextual inquiry - and externalises what it learns into a persona: a composite representation of a user type, complete with goals, frustrations, and context. However earnestly and empathically constructed, however faithfully grounded in genuine encounters with real people, the persona is an act of externalisation. It is then objectivated as it circulates through the programme: printed on office walls, referenced in backlog refinement, cited in business cases, invoked in sprint planning. Development team members - some of whom may never have met an actual user, who are working at several removes from the situations the research described - begin speaking of what "the persona" wants, what "the persona" needs, whether a feature serves "the persona". The persona has become a thing in the room: no longer a contingent interpretation of complex, situated human experience but a stable referent that appears to speak for itself. And when subsequent actors encounter it, they internalise it not as a design team's provisional reading of a research encounter but as a factual account of who the user is. The situated, relational understanding that produced the persona has been stripped away; what remains is a governance artefact that demonstrates user research has occurred. The persona's presence in the programme satisfies accountability requirements - we are user-centred, we have personas - whether anyone acts on the insights it was supposed to convey becomes secondary.
Tonkinwise's critique as reification analysis
Tonkinwise (2023), in his lecture to the SVA Products of Design programme, mounts a sustained critique of service design's tools that can be read as an unacknowledged reification analysis. His arguments, when examined through this lens, are not merely observations about what the tools get wrong but descriptions of how reification operates through the tools themselves.
Consider his treatment of the service blueprint. Tonkinwise notes that a blueprint is "literally a specification document" that "tells construction workers exactly what to do"; it is "primarily a management tool... the tool that a manager has to discipline a worker". The theatrical metaphor of frontstage and backstage, the "line of visibility" that conceals labour, the representation of the service worker as "merely a box within the overall blueprint" - these are features of a tool that transforms relational care work into a manageable process flow. What I have discussed elsewhere as the politics of the line of visibility is, in reification terms, a specific mechanism by which social relations (between care workers, between workers and the people they serve) or where formerly manual behaviours or workflows are automated and blackboxed behind the curtain of visibility, and in so doing are made to appear as thing-like properties of a system. The process appears self-moving, independent of the people enacting it; the labour behind the line disappears into infrastructure. The bustle of the hotel kitchen, or waste management or infrastructure, hidden away and only re-emerging as a "service failure" when it stops working. The blueprint's theatrical metaphor is not a neutral representation; it is a representational form that enacts the reification of care work by design.
Tonkinwise's argument about emotional labour delves into this: Service design, he observes, "pays very little attention to the service worker doing all this emotional labor" - the effort of controlling one's own emotions, performing prescribed emotions, and reading and managing customers' emotions. This is the intersubjective dimension of reification that Honneth (2008) describes as "forgetfulness of recognition": the blueprint enacts a practical orientation that treats persons as functional positions rather than as beings whose existence matters. The worker's humanity is not denied; it is rendered invisible by a representational form that cannot express it.
His observation about "contexts of aggregation" - that empathy sees the individual interaction but cannot see the silenced voices, the structural conditions, or the political settlements that produced the current arrangement - describes a further dimension. Empathy, directed at the individual user, is already working with a reified fragment: the encounter abstracted from the systemic conditions that produced it. The specific person's frustration with a digital service is real, but it is also the surface expression of procurement decisions, governance frameworks, vendor dependencies, and political settlements that empathy alone cannot reach. As I have argued in The Limits of Making Visible, making the individual experience visible does not, in itself, change the structural conditions that produced it. Reification explains why: the structural conditions have already been naturalised as "just how things work".
And Tonkinwise's historical observation - that "services become designable as the state stops caring, as the state is stopped from caring" under early-1980s neoliberalism - identifies the political economy within which service design's tools were forged. The tools are not neutral instruments that happen to conceal labour; they were shaped within, and carry the assumptions of, a historical moment in which the commodity form's logic of abstraction and quantification, through digitisation and outsourcing was being deliberately extended into public services. The blueprint arrived as a management tool because the context in which it was invented was one in which management's relationship to labour was being restructured; the theatrical metaphor of frontstage and backstage naturalised the concealment of work because the economic logic of the period demanded precisely that concealment.
A diagnostic vocabulary: four forms of reification
Gunderson (2020), in a careful typology of reification, distinguishes four experiential modes that provide a diagnostic vocabulary applicable to design practice in programme contexts. These modes are not competing theories; they are analytically distinct mechanisms that reinforce one another.
The first is what Gunderson calls doxa, drawing on Bourdieu: the mode of experience in which the social causes of events are forgotten and their effects are taken as "the way things are". Doxa describes the condition in which programme governance structures - business cases, stage gates, benefits frameworks, procurement processes - appear as self-evident features of organisational reality rather than as contingent historical products. "Of course we need a benefits framework"; "of course design must demonstrate value through metrics"; "of course the data platform captures these particular indicators". Each "of course" marks a moment of doxic experience: a social arrangement that has been naturalised into common sense.
The second mode, identification, describes the condition in which abstract, formalised, often quantified representations are experienced as more real than the concrete particulars they represent. Drawing on Adorno's concept of "identity thinking", Gunderson characterises this as the subsumption of particular objects under generalising concepts, producing a stance that is "dismissive or distrustful of qualitative experience". In programme contexts, identification is the mechanism by which the KPI becomes more real than the care encounter it was supposed to measure, the dashboard metric more authoritative than the clinician's judgement, the backlog item more actionable than the research insight. The state spaces I have written about elsewhere are, in part, an attempt to preserve the relational structure that identification would collapse into categorical abstraction.
It is also what happens when "the user need" - an abstraction derived from contextual, qualitative inquiry - is treated as a more reliable guide to action than the situated understanding from which it was drawn. The abstraction circulates more easily through governance systems precisely because it has shed the contingency that made it meaningful; the cost of portability is the loss of context.
The third mode, enframing, describes the condition in which technology appears neutral and immune from evaluation. Drawing on Heidegger, Gunderson characterises this as the experience in which everything is "ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering". Dashboards, under enframing, are not social constructions with particular assumptions built in; they are neutral instruments that simply "show the data". The governance framework does not shape what counts as value; it merely records value that already exists. Enframing is what makes critique of these instruments feel like denial of reality rather than challenge to social arrangements.
The fourth mode, detachment, describes experience after the suspension of genuine emotional engagement. This connects directly to Tonkinwise's argument about emotional labour: the blueprint's process logic demands that the service worker's emotional reality be set aside in favour of functional performance. But detachment also operates at the organisational level; when programme governance treats design findings as "inputs" to be "considered" rather than as descriptions of lived experience that make moral claims, the governance process has adopted the detached stance that reification produces.
The performance-and-substance gap I identified in earlier work is, in this vocabulary, a gap between the detached processing of design artefacts and the engaged recognition that those artefacts are supposed to convey.
These four modes operate as a system rather than as independent phenomena. Doxa naturalises the governance structure; identification ensures that formal, quantified representations displace qualitative understanding; enframing renders the instruments of governance immune from critique; and detachment ensures that the moral claims of design findings are processed without engagement. Together, they produce a stable condition in which design is present, active, and visible - producing artefacts that satisfy governance requirements - whilst substantively unable to influence outcomes.
Institutional logics constrain the level of reification
Kimbell (2021), in her analysis of the institutional logics through which design operates in social and public sector contexts, identifies something that the reification literature does not foreground: the level of simplification is not epistemically determined but politically constrained. Her three logics - innovation-austerity, deliberation-pluralism, and anticipation-utopia - each impose different requirements on how complex a concept is permitted to be.
Under the innovation-austerity logic, which dominates programme-led public sector contexts, design is positioned as an enabler of innovation within austerity constraints. This logic, Kimbell argues, "downplays the political conditions in which social design is organised and carried out". Critical voices are tolerated but marginalised; designers are advised to think of themselves as responsive rather than responsible for outcomes. The implication for reification is this: the innovation-austerity logic demands concepts simple enough to fit business cases, demonstrate efficiency gains, and operate within existing governance frameworks. Design understanding that exceeds this level of simplicity - that insists on contingency, on the relational structure of service encounters, on the political settlements embedded in data architectures - cannot survive the translation into institutional discourse. The logic determines how much complexity the institution can absorb; reification is the mechanism by which the excess is stripped away.
This connects to the distinction I have drawn between planning and design. Planning, as I have argued elsewhere, operates within a known state space: it navigates a domain whose structure is taken as given. Design inquiry proposes a state space - it surfaces candidate dimensions, tests where boundaries might fall, explores what could count as a move. But as Tonkinwise's argument implies, the state space that actually governs institutional action is not constructed by design alone; it is politically determined. Which dimensions survive, which boundaries hold, which moves are permitted - these are settled by the institutional logics and political economies within which design operates; as von Busch and Palmås (2023) argue, it is not virtuous ideas or intentions that get made or have real effects, but tensions between networks of power, incentives, and influences. Reification is the mechanism that converts design's provisional, contingent inquiry into planning's given, navigable domain - and in that conversion, it is the political conditions, not the designer, that determine what is kept and what is discarded. The gap - as we discuss it here - is the trace this conversion leaves: the discrepancy between the richness of what design inquiry discovers and the simplicity of what institutional governance can process.
Implications
The argument here is not that reification is avoidable or that it represents a failure on anyone's part. Hajer's insight - that regulation depends on the loss of meaning - applies equally to programme governance: you cannot run a programme board on the basis of situated, contingent, relational design understanding with all its uncertainty intact. Some simplification is a precondition for collective action. The question is whether designers recognise the simplification as a political act rather than a neutral translation, and whether they have analytical vocabulary for understanding what is lost and why.
Tonkinwise (2023) provides the observations; Hajer (2003), Gunderson (2020), and Berger and Luckmann (2011) provide the mechanism. Service design's tools - blueprints, journey maps, personas, backlogs - are not merely imperfect representations of complex reality. They are reifying artefacts: instruments that transform relational, situated, contingent understanding into thing-like properties that can circulate through institutional contexts. This transformation is what makes the tools useful; it is also what makes them politically consequential. The blueprint that conceals labour does so not because the designer forgot to include it, but because the institutional context within which the blueprint circulates requires a representation in which labour is invisible.
The persona that flattens a complex person, or groups of unique individuals from unique social contexts and with complex social histories and agencies into a set of attributes, or A4 representation does so not because the designer lacks empathy, but because the organisational division of labour demands it. A distributed development team - often outsourced, often working at several removes from anyone who has met an actual user, assembled under precisely the service-economy logic that Tonkinwise traces to 1980s neoliberalism - requires some portable representation of user understanding on which to base interface decisions. The designer is asked, in effect, to codify and condense situated knowledge into a form that can travel through procurement boundaries, vendor handoffs, and sprint cycles without the designer being present to interpret it. And the organisation requires this reification to handle the complexity and uncertainty of delivering services at scale: you cannot run a product backlog on the basis of "it depends on the context"; you need a persona, a user need, a decidable concept where a situated understanding once stood. The reification is not a failure of the tool; it is the tool's purpose - and recognising this is what separates a critical use of personas from a naive one.
Recognising this opens a diagnostic question that is worth taking seriously: if certain representational forms actively enable reification - linearising relational structure, collapsing contextual specificity into categorical abstraction, concealing the contingency of their own construction - might other representational forms resist it? The graph-based representations and state space models I have explored in earlier posts attempt to preserve relational structure that linear representations flatten. Whether they succeed in resisting reification, or merely defer it, is a question I will return to in a subsequent post - along with the deeper question of what it would mean for design practice to undertake deliberate de-reification: the recovery of contingency, situatedness, and relational depth from the thing-like concepts that institutional governance requires.
References
Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T. (2011). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Open Road Media.
Blackwell, A. (2007). The reification of metaphor as a design tool. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 13(4), 490-530.
Ehn, P. (2008). Participation in design things. In Proceedings of the Tenth Anniversary Conference on Participatory Design, 92-101. Indiana University.
Gedenryd, H. (1998). How Designers Work: Making Sense of Authentic Cognitive Activities. Lund University Cognitive Studies 75.
Gunderson, R. (2020). Things are the way they are: A typology of reification. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 46(7), 839-859.
Hajer, M. A. (2003). Ecological modernization: Discourse and institutional change. In J. S. Dryzek and D. Schlosberg (Eds.), Debating the Earth: The Environmental Politics Reader (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Honneth, A. (2008). Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea. Oxford University Press.
Kimbell, L. (2021). Logics of Social Design. Bloomsbury.
Seitz, T. (2019). Design Thinking and the New Spirit of Capitalism. Palgrave Macmillan.
Tonkinwise, C. (2023). All care, no responsibility: Everything service designers need to know about politics but were afraid to ask. Guest lecture, MFA Products of Design, SVA.
van Hulst, M. and Yanow, D. (2014). From policy "frames" to "framing": Theorizing a more dynamic, political approach. The American Review of Public Administration, 46(1), 92-112.
von Busch, O. and Palmås, K. (2023). The Corruption of Co-Design: Political and Social Conflicts in Participatory Design Thinking. Routledge.