29
too much detachment from existing practices in primary animal and crop production, housing
construction, and knowledge generation appeared to present insurmountable problems:
alignment with these practices, expressing itself both as the difficulty to recognize and deal with
some implementation problems and as anticipations of others.
6. Conclusions
This contribution was undertaken so as to obtain more empirical insight in reflexive design and
its challenges. We have seen that, even though the institutional arrangement created in P348 was
relatively well designed for reflexivity, the effort of reflexive design was significantly hampered by
the ways in which established institutions managed to enter the project. Both the ways in which
this occurred and the - more or less successful - ways in which these influences were dealt with
can be understood from the perspective of Wenger's framework. Engagement in reflexive design
was, under circumstances, promoted by methods that stressed trans-disciplinary cooperation as
well as imagination through the construction of visions. It was also hampered by the fact that
knowledge workers as well as other participants brought in established identities and tended to
align with existing practices. We have seen how anticipation by knowledge workers of negative
responses by 'significant others' provides a case in point. Such alignment, as we have seen, could
be accommodated through appropriate method; it could, however, not be pre-empted. Similarly,
alignment through anticipations of power relations (the poultry project) and institutional
differentiations (Hercules) is hard to pre-empt. Imagination may help to make these issues
discursive; but the degree of success seems to be co-determined by the degree to which this
vision can be constructively related to real world problems (cp. poultry vs. Hercules): apparently,
participants all too well realize that they are eventually to re-enter the real world.
Convention