Undesign : critical practices at the intersection of art and design 9781138695702, 113869570X, 9781138695719, 1138695718

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 What is critical design?
2 Notes on more-than-human architecture
3 The un-designability of the virtual: design from problem-solving to problem-finding
4 Critical operationality: Energy and Co-Designing Communities (ECDC) by the Interaction Research Studio (IRS), Goldsmiths, London (2010–2014)
5 A statement for attending to diverse economies through design research
6 ‘I prefer not to’: anti-progressive designing
7 Speculative design as research method: from answers to questions and “staying with the trouble”
8 Inhabiting practices: operating between art, design, science and technology
9 A finger pointing at the moon: absence, emptiness and Ma in design
10 Hacking the semiosphere: the Ad Hoc Atlas: a manifesto as manifestation of undesign, V5.3: an exercise in reflexive (and recursive) design practice about design by design
11 (Un)design, commerce and artistic autonomy: site-specific art in China
12 Bridging counter-culture grassroots initiatives with design
13 Undesigning borders: urban spaces of borders and counter-practices of looking
14 Natural disasters, undesign and the absent interior
15 “Imagination wove this flesh garment”: fashion, critique and capitalism
Index

Citation preview

“Reading Undesign will undesign you. These essays collectively confront, challenge and stall the trajectory of design. Resisting the impetus to redefine design, which just perpetuates it as a concept, Undesign effects a pause and opens up the conditions – and imperative – for practitioners, educators, academics and students to re-consider design and the world differently.” Suzie Attiwill, Associate Dean Interior Design, School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT University.

UNDESIGN

Undesign brings together leading artists, designers and theorists working at the intersection of art and design. The text focuses on design practices, and conceptual approaches, which challenge the traditional notion that design should emphasise its utility over aesthetic or other non-functional considerations. This publication brings to light emerging practices that consider the social, political and aesthetic potential of “undesigning” our complex designed world. In documenting these new developments, the book highlights the overlaps with science, engineering, biotechnology and hacktivism, which operate at the intersection of art and design. Gretchen Coombs is an early career academic exploring socially engaged art and design practices in the US, the UK and Australia. She combines the skills from her PhD in social and cultural anthropology with her MA in visual criticism to write essays on contemporary culture. Gretchen is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in Design & Creative Practice and a core member of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT. She is the CoEditor for Art & the Public Sphere. Andrew McNamara is an art historian and Professor of Visual Arts at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. His publications include: Sweat – the subtropical imaginary (2011); An Apprehensive Aesthetic (2009);  Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia, with Ann Stephen and Philip Goad (2008); plus Surpassing Modernity: Ambivalence in Art, Politics and Society (2018). He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Australian chair of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’art (CIHA). Gavin Sade is currently the Associate Dean (Academic) in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology. He is also an internationally recognised practiceled researcher in the fields of electronic arts and interactive media, and has been commissioned to produce creative works for international biennials and festivals, art galleries and public institutions, as well as private companies. His academic research occurs at the intersection at Art, Design, Science and Technology, and focuses on the way interdisciplinary creativepractices contribute to the generation of new knowledge and innovation.

UNDESIGN Critical Practices at the Intersection of Art and Design

Edited by Gretchen Coombs Andrew McNamara and Gavin Sade

First edition published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Gretchen Coombs, Andrew McNamara, Gavin Sade; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Gretchen Coombs, Andrew McNamara, Gavin Sade to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-69570-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-69571-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-52637-9 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of figures ix List of contributors xii Acknowledgementsxvi Introduction Andrew McNamara, Gretchen Coombs and Gavin Sade

1

  1 What is critical design? Brad Haylock

9

  2 Notes on more-than-human architecture Stanislav Roudavski   3 The un-designability of the virtual: design from problem-solving to problem-finding Betti Marenko   4 Critical operationality: Energy and Co-Designing Communities (ECDC) by the Interaction Research Studio (IRS), Goldsmiths, London (2010–2014) Katherine Moline

24

38

54

  5 A statement for attending to diverse economies through design research Carl DiSalvo

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  6 ‘I prefer not to’: anti-progressive designing Cameron Tonkinwise

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viii Contents

  7 Speculative design as research method: from answers to questions and “staying with the trouble” Anne Galloway and Catherine Caudwell

85

  8 Inhabiting practices: operating between art, design, science and technology Leah Heiss

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  9 A finger pointing at the moon: absence, emptiness and Ma in design Yoko Akama 10 Hacking the semiosphere: the Ad Hoc Atlas: a manifesto as manifestation of undesign,V5.3: an exercise in reflexive (and recursive) design practice about design by design Joshua Singer 11 (Un)design, commerce and artistic autonomy: site-specific art in China Xin Gu and Justin O’Connor 12 Bridging counter-culture grassroots initiatives with design Spyros Bofylatos 13 Undesigning borders: urban spaces of borders and counter-practices of looking Mahmoud Keshavarz 14 Natural disasters, undesign and the absent interior Kirsty Volz 15 “Imagination wove this flesh garment”: fashion, critique and capitalism Kathleen Horton and Alice Payne

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Index198

FIGURES

1.1 Types of futures, showing speculative design as a critical practice, drawn by the author, adapted from Hancock and Bezold 1994 3.1 HygroScope: meteorosensitive morphology. 2012. Permanent collection, Centre Pompidou Paris. Achim Menges. Institute for Computational Design ©ICD University of Stuttgart 3.2 Amoeba protocell trainer. Conceptual prototype. 2012. Shamees Aden ©Shamees Aden 4.1 Babble in-situ. Bill Gaver, Mike Michael, Tobie Kerridge, Liliana Ovale, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, Alex Wilkie and Jennifer Gabrys, Energy and Co-Designing Communities (ECDC) (2010–2014) 4.2 ECDC cultural probe. Bill Gaver, Mike Michael, Tobie Kerridge, Liliana Ovale, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, Alex Wilkie and Jennifer Gabrys, Energy and Co-Designing Communities (ECDC) (2010–2014) 4.3 Tabloid headlines. Bill Gaver, Mike Michael, Tobie Kerridge, Liliana Ovale, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, Alex Wilkie and Jennifer Gabrys, Energy and Co-Designing Communities (ECDC) (2010–2014) 4.4 A selection of returned probes, including conversations between appliances, sketches an end-of-all survival kit, and an energy confession. Bill Gaver, Mike Michael, Tobie Kerridge, Liliana Ovale, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, Alex Wilkie and Jennifer Gabrys, Energy and Co-Designing Communities (ECDC) (2010–2014) 7.1 “Merino ewes and lambs raised on lush, green pasture.” Grow Your Own Lamb – In Vivo. Copyright Anne Galloway 7.2 “Fresh lamb cutlets produced your way!” Grow Your Own Lamb – In Vivo. Copyright Anne Galloway and Matasila Freshwater 7.3 “Cultured food animals listen to Radio New Zealand.” Grow Your Own Lamb – In Vitro. Copyright Anne Galloway and Matasila Freshwater 7.4 “Meat and fibre: felted racks of lamb.” Grow Your Own Lamb – In Vitro. Copyright Anne Galloway and Matasila Freshwater

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63 90 90 90 91

x Figures

8.1 Leah Heiss | Polarity (detail) 2012 | Installation, magnetic liquid, propylene glycol, ethanol, glass vessels, motors, rare earth magnets, table | National New Media Art Award 2012, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, August 3–November 4, 2012 |Photograph: Mark Sherwood, QAGOMA| © Courtesy: The artist 8.2 The Smart Heart cardiac monitor necklace. Developed in collaboration with Associate Professor Keely Macarow, Associate Professor Paul Beckett, St.Vincent’s Hospital and the Nossal Institute for Global Health. Funding provided by the Gandel Foundation. Photograph by Narelle Portanier 8.3 Wearable falls monitor on the wrist of a resident in an aged care facility 8.4 Diabetes jewellery – applicator necklace, developed in collaboration with Nanotechnology Victoria, 2007–8. Photograph by Narelle Portanier 8.5 Members of the public modelling future forms for medical devices using Magiclay, NGV Bolwell Edge Residency in connection with Melbourne Now, March 2014 8.6 Models created by members of the public during Heiss’s NGV Bolwell Edge Residency in connection with Melbourne Now, March 2014. Photograph by Mina Carneli and Katrina Mulcahy 9.1 Composition of the character of Ma – a light shinning between shutters 10.1 Joshua Singer, Map for Dérives of Visual (& Graphic) Landscapes [: & Interstices of Temporal Layers of Urban Surfaces] in “Ad-Hoc Atlas Version 2,Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin”, (Detail of printed book), 2013 10.2 Joshua Singer, Ad-Hoc Atlas Version 2,Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin (Cover of printed book), 2013 10.3 Joshua Singer, Berlin Graphic Semiome: Google Image Search “Berlin” in “Ad-Hoc Atlas Version 2,Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin”, 2013. Image © Google Earth, Artistic collage courtesy of the author 10.4 Joshua Singer, Samples of Elements of Graphic Semiomes of Design City Berlin in “Ad-Hoc Atlas Version 2,Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin”, 2013 10.5 Joshua Singer, Interchangeable-City-Surface-Modules_04 (video still), 2016 10.6 Joshua Singer, Interchangeable-City-Surface-Modules_04 (video still), 2016 10.7 Joshua Singer, Interchangeable-City-Surface-Modules_04 (video still), 2016 10.8 Joshua Singer, Diagram for Reading the Urban Semiospheric Metabolism in “Ad-Hoc Atlas Version 2,Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin”, 2013. Image © Google Earth, Artistic collage courtesy of the author 10.9 Joshua Singer, Diagram for Reading the Urban Semiospheric Metabolism, (Detail of printed book) in “Ad-Hoc Atlas Version 2,Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin”, 2013. Image © Google Earth, Artistic collage courtesy of the author 10.10 Joshua Singer, Illustrations of Semiosphere Modeling in “Ad-Hoc Atlas Version 2,Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin”, 2013 10.11 Joshua Singer, Malmö-Pixel-Test-01, 2014 10.12 Joshua Singer, Structural Model of the Graphic City in “Ad-Hoc Atlas Version 2,Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin”, 2013 10.13 Joshua Singer, Geographic Model of the Graphic City in “Ad-Hoc Atlas Version 2,Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin”, 2013

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100 102 103

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124 124 125 126 126

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129 129 130 131 131

Figures  xi

10.14 Joshua Singer, from Image Narratives: Layers & Annotations for New Spaces in “Ad-Hoc Atlas Version 2,Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin” (Detail of printed book), 2013 132 10.15 Joshua Singer, Modernism Test in Google Earth (Detail), 2013. Image © Google Earth, Artistic collage courtesy of the author 132 10.16 Joshua Singer, Test View in Google Earth for Image Narratives (“Homme”) (Detail), 2013. Image © Google Earth, Artistic collage courtesy of the author 133 10.17 Joshua Singer, Test View of the Berlin Prosthethic Semiospheric Metabolic Reader Output, 2013. Image © Google Earth, Artistic collage courtesy of the author 134 11.1 SiFang Art Museum. Author’s own photo 142 11.2 Live performance of the art work Etude – Tempo III, by artist Yuji. 143 Photo: courtesy of Yuji 13.1 An example of altermobility in Stockholm undergrounds during REVA operations. Photo: courtesy of Laura Luna, February 25, 2013, www.twitter.com/misslauraluna166 13.2 The first kit used for actions. Photo: author 169 13.3 Photos from the first action in Malmö in June 2013. Photo: courtesy of 170 border-framing dot-eu 13.4 Collaged Image of the extended and continuous tape over the city of 172 Malmö. Image: author 14.1 Chair removed from the Blackall Hotel in the 1906 floods. Image source: 177 John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland 14.2 Mud-encrusted electronic turntable from the Queensland Museum collections (Object No. H48145). Part of the Queensland Museum’s 179 collection of flood damaged artifacts (photo by author) 14.3 6539 Canal Street by Robert Polidori. Polidori documents how 181 floodwaters damage interior lining of buildings 14.4 Kissing Swans by Chris Bennie. Flood damaged caravan as sculpture and 182 installation site for Bennie’s video work

CONTRIBUTORS

Yoko Akama is a design researcher at RMIT University, Australia. She co-leads the Design and Social Innovation in Asia-Pacific network (http://desiap.org/) and Design + Ethnography + Futures research program (http://d-e-futures.com/) at RMIT’s School of Media and Communication. Her Japanese heritage has embedded a Zen-informed relational practice to carve a “tao” (path) in design and has published extensively on this topic. This practice is shaped by working with regional communities in Australia in strengthening their resilience for disaster preparedness, and with Indigenous Nations enact their sovereignty and self-determination. She is an Adjunct Fellow of an ecosystem innovation studio, Re:public Japan, and Visiting Fellow at the Centre of Excellence in Media Practice, Bournemouth University, UK. She serves on several editorial boards of international journals, and conference review committees. She is a recipient of several major research grants in Australia and the UK and winner of the prestigious Good Design Australia Awards in 2014. For more information, please visit www.rmit.edu.au/staff/yokoakama. Spyros Bofylatos holds a doctorate in theory of design from the Department of Products

and System Design Engineering of the University of the Aegean, Greece. His research sprawls around design for sustainability, craft, service design and social innovation. His work is based on creating meaningful dialogue between the theoretical framework and the sociotechnical propositional artefacts that embody different research questions. At the very core of this process is the notion that we live in transitional times and fostering the discourse that leads to networks of artefacts that embody alternative systems of values is necessary to move away from today’s unsustainable society. Catherine Caudwell is a lecturer in the Culture + Context Design Program at The School of Design, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Catherine’s interdisciplinary research explores how techniques and genres of storytelling can be employed to understand and foster relationships between people and design. Gretchen Coombs is an early career academic exploring socially engaged art and design practices in the US, the UK and Australia. She combines the skills from her PhD in social and

Contributors  xiii

cultural anthropology with her MA in Visual Criticism to write essays on contemporary culture. Gretchen is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in Design & Creative Practice and a core member of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT. She is the co-editor for Art & the Public Sphere. Carl DiSalvo is researcher, designer and writer based in Atlanta. He is an associate professor in

the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, where he directs the Public Design Workshop. His first book, Adversarial Design, was published by MIT Press. DiSalvo’s experimental design work has been exhibited and supported by the ZKM, Science Gallery Dublin and the Walker Arts Center. Anne Galloway leads the More-Than-Human Lab (http://morethanhumanlab.org/) and

teaches in the Culture + Context Design Program at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.Trained as an anthropologist, her ethnographic research critically examines entanglements of people, animals, spaces and technologies, and explores creative methods for public engagement around related matters of concern. Xin Gu is Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies in the School of Media Film and Journalism at Monash University, Australia. Her research covers cultural and creative industries, arts and cultural management, digital culture and society. She is about to publish Culture and Economy in the New Shanghai (Routledge). Brad Haylock is a designer, publisher and academic. He is an associate professor of Design at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, where he is Program Manager of the Master of Communication Design. His research spans typography, independent publishing, critical sociology and sociologies of critique. He is founding editor of Surpllus, an independent, paraacademic imprint focusing on critical and speculative practices across art, design and theory. Leah Heiss is an award-winning Melbourne-based designer working at the nexus of design,

health and technology. Her practice traverses device, service and experience and her process is deeply collaborative, working with experts from nanotechnology, engineering and health services through to manufacturing. Leah’s health technology projects include jewellery to administer insulin through the skin for diabetics; biosignal sensing emergency jewellery; and swallowable devices to detect disease. She has most recently designed a modular hearing aid with a leading Melbourne hearing technology company. Leah’s design work has been exhibited and presented both locally and globally and attracted significant press across all platforms. Her practice has commercial, research and academic outcomes. Kathleen Horton teaches Fashion History and Theory in the School of Design at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Her teaching and research centres on the aesthetic, political and social aspects of fashion design practice across both historical and contemporary contexts. In 2010, Kathleen founded The Stitchery Collective, a fashion design co-operative that explores innovative models for the production and consumption of fashion in the twentyfirst century. Mahmoud Keshavarz is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Engaging Vulnerability Research

Program, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala University, Sweden.

xiv Contributors

He has been a Visiting Scholar at Parsons The New School of Design and University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His research and publications sit at the intersection of design studies and politics of movement and migration. His book, The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility and Dissent, is forthcoming in 2018. He is co-founder of Decolonizing Design Group and co-editor of Design and Culture Journal. Betti Marenko works at the intersection of design and philosophy, examining the tensions between design as way of speculating on, and instigating, the future, and thought concerned with materiality, affect, the virtual and the nonhuman. Her current research on digital uncertainty focuses on the new contingent logics of digital computation and algorithm-driven cognitive shift in what it means to be human. It examines design’s role in shaping potential futures through unpredictability and minor practices. Betti works on animism as a posthuman, postuser, postcognitive reframing of interaction with the nonhumanity of digital objects and collaborates with Phil van Allen (Art Center College of Design Pasadena) on “animistic design” projects. Her work is published in Digital Creativity, Design Studies, Design and Culture. She is Contextual Studies Leader, BA (Hons.) Product Design, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. She is co-Editor, with Brassett, of the volume Deleuze and Design (2015). Andrew McNamara is Art Historian and Professor of Visual Arts at Queensland University

of Technology, Australia. His publications include Sweat – The Subtropical Imaginary (2011); An Apprehensive Aesthetic (2009); Modern Times:The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia, with Ann Stephen and Philip Goad (2008); and Surpassing Modernity: An Ambivalent Quest (Bloomsbury: London, forthcoming). He is Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Australian Chair of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’art (CIHA). Katherine Moline is currently Associate Dean Research Training at UNSW Art & Design,

Sydney. Her research explores interdisciplinary practices in visual art and contemporary experimental design. Since introducing international leaders in experimental and critical design to Australian audiences in the exhibition “Connections: Experimental Design” (2007), the more recent projects she has led include “Feral Experimental” (2014), “Experimental Practice: Provocations In and Out of Design” (2015), “Experimental Thinking: Design Practices” (2015) and “Climactic: Post Normal Design” (2016). Katherine’s practice-based research investigates how design technologies, such as mobile telephones and CCTV, can be diverted to the production of provocative experiential and conceptual interactions. Justin O’Connor is Professor of Communications and Cultural Economy at Monash Uni-

versity, Australia, and visiting Chair of Shanghai Jiaotong University, China. He is Drector of the research unit Culture Media Economy, and co-Director of the Monash-Jiaotong Global Cultural Economy Research Hub. Alice Payne is a lecturer in Fashion at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Her research interests include the fashion design process, the Australian mass-market fashion industry and the problem of design for sustainability within the fashion context. Alice is an award-winning designer and has exhibited her work in Australia and overseas. Stanislav Roudavski explores philosophies of ecology, technology, design and architecture; design fiction and conceptual designing; creative computing; parametric and generative

Contributors  xv

processes in architecture; emergence and self-organisation; complex geometries and digital fabrication; virtual and augmented environments; theory and practice of place-making; and practice-based research methodologies. His work has been disseminated through multiple academic publications and international exhibitions. Prior to his current academic position at the Melbourne School of Design, he worked on research projects at the University of Cambridge, UK, had a teaching engagement at MIT and practiced architecture in several European countries. Gavin Sade is currently Associate Dean (Academic) in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He is also an internationally recognised practice-led researcher in the field of electronic arts and interactive media, and has been commissioned to produce creative works for international biennials and festivals, art galleries and public institutions, as well as private companies. His academic research occurs at the intersection at Art, Design, Science and Technology, and focuses on the way interdisciplinary creativepractices contribute to the generation of new knowledge and innovation.

Joshua Singer is a graphic designer, researcher, writer and Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Visual Communication Program at San Francisco State University, California, USA. He is the principal of Atomtan Design creating editorial and identity for arts organisations. His research areas include Counter Design and divergent methods of design research with focus in the graphic urban landscape. He has exhibited his work, presented and published papers in the US and Europe. He has a BA from Hampshire College, an MFA in Fine Art from Hunter College, CUNY and an MFA in Design from California College of the Arts. Cameron Tonkinwise is Professor of Interdisciplinary Design at University of Technology,

Sydney. His research areas include Service Design, Social Design and Sharing Economies. Cameron has published a number of articles mapping the practice of Transition Design. He has held previous positions at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design and Parsons The New School for Design. Cameron has a background in continental philosophy and continues to research what design practice can learn from material cultural studies and sociologies of technology. Cameron’s current focus, in collaboration with colleagues at CMU and an international network of scholar-practitioners, is Transition Design, a design-enabled multi-level, multi-stage structural change towards more sustainable futures. Kirsty Volz is a PhD candidate within the ATCH group at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her thesis discusses the built works of Queensland’s early women architects, focusing on the work of interwar architect and ceramist, Nell McCredie. Kirsty trained in interior design and architecture has previously taught in both disciplines. Her research on interior design and scenography has been published in the IDEA Journal, TEXT Journal, Lilith: A Feminist History and the International Journal of Interior Architecture and Spatial Design, for which she is also an associate editor.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors would like to thank everyone involved in the long process that has been Undesign. Anastasia Booth, Greg Hearn, Jeremy Kerr, Ben Krall, Justin O’Connor, Nan O’Sullivan, Becky Green, Courtney Pedersen, Charles Robb,Tonya Sweet, Manuela Tobaoda, Emma White, and QUT Creative Industries.

INTRODUCTION Andrew McNamara, Gretchen Coombs and Gavin Sade

In the beginning we designed objects for production, designs to be turned into wood and steel, glass and brick or plastic – then we produced neutral and usable designs, then finally negative utopias, forewarning images of the horrors which architecture was laying in store for us with its scientific methods for the perpetuation of existing models. – Superstudio, from the exhibition catalogue, ‘Fragments from a Personal Museum’ at the Neue Galerie, Graz, Austria, 1973.

Undesign articulates a sentiment, or a mood, as much as outlining a set of distinct design practices. The quote from Italian collective Superstudio sets out the parameters of the problem: design has been enormously successful. Design shapes our world and enhances our capacities. From the urban environment to our bodies, even to nature, there is little that remains untouched by design. As Superstudio noted, design has become ubiquitous. Our very capacity to do anything is underpinned by design, including our ability to negotiate our way through the day. Products of design not only accompany us in our daily lives, but they also structure it. And yet, our capacity to do anything about design is also determined by design. Undesign upsets this symmetrical relation that assumes design is the solution to the very same problems it creates. This book confronts this paradox against the backdrop of the same accelerating developments in science and technology that confronted Superstudio. The difference now is that each exponential step means that these developments acquire increasing potential to reshape the future of the human species and of the planet. The accumulated changes are so profound that the term Anthropocene has been coined to account for the impact human society is now exerting on the Earth’s ecosystems. Human population growth and our capacity to transform the natural environment for our own ends is placing demands upon the planet that are beyond its capacity to sustain them, so much so that leading scientists and experts are suggesting that we need to contemplate becoming a multi-planet species.The gravity of the realization has led some in design circles to argue that ‘we are part of the age that is killing the future’ (Fry 2008: 247), which underscores the extent of this epochal change. Over the last century, technological and industrial developments have advanced faster than social, economic, political, legal and philosophical frameworks to account for them. The

2  Andrew McNamara, Gretchen Coombs and Gavin Sade

resulting tensions are nonetheless felt along social and political fault lines. While it could be argued that society will adapt, recent history has demonstrated that our political and social processes are not as agile as untrammeled technological innovation.The combination of rapid advancements in science and technology combined with the increasing urgency of addressing pressing global environmental problems presents a significant challenge. For designers faced with this situation, there has always been the consolation that design will present solutions that help shape the future for the better.1 This conventional assumption has been challenged by a counter-argument suggesting that it is part of the problem. Fry (1999), for example, suggests that design is destroying the future. He describes an alternative pathway of undoing the design of human society as a form of “defuturing.” This ambition, he argues, is ‘a necessary learning that travels before any design or constructional action if any effort is to be made to acquire the ability to sustain’ (Fry 1999: 2). Fry’s critique is part of a wider movement to redirect design practices toward more sustainable approaches. Part of this process aims to show how design is a complex human activity with consequences that extend far beyond its immediate application at a specific or functional level – the level at which all design attention is usually directed and confined. Ultimately, Tony Fry’s body of work rethinks design by drawing attention to the way design both creates and limits possible futures, hence his focus on how it “defutures” in the dual sense of creating and limiting opportunities. This reading of design, according to Fry, is the outcome of ‘an assemblage of post-structural phenomenology and applied deconstructive practice’ (Fry 1999: 284). The essential point is that many writers, including Fry, insist that design needs to be considered part of the problem before any alternative formulation of its role can be put forward. Design needs to be envisaged as part of the problem of sustainability. It would mean showing how it is ensnared in the attempt to resolve it, deferring the automatic assumption that more or better design can ameliorate the situation – which creates a zombie-like dynamic, for even the attempt to ameliorate the dilemmas it is causing may only compound the issues further. Three broad modes of inquiry help to outline some of the broad parameters of undesign more concretely: nearly all of the contributions found in this collection of essays engage with one or more of these pathways (although they are not exclusive categorizations of undesign). First of all, Anthony Dunne’s seminal book Hertzian Tales (2005) suggests another critical point of departure for any renewed interest in alternatives or challenges to design. While adamantly situated within the parameters of design, Dunne’s publication questions practices that he defines as affirmative design – commercial design practices that reinforce the status quo. Dunne seeks to rethink what design could be and what questions it could raise. His work underscores how industrial design – when in service of a new world of fashionable products – only further exacerbates problems of the kind that Superstudio reacted against (primarily, design as production of more and more commodities).2 While employing practices of design, the intention of Dunne’s idea of critical design is to use design as a way of engaging in a critical dialogue about the assumed nature of the designed world that we inhabit. It also explores the alternative ways that design may structure the future patterns of life. Another way of looking at a different set of related issues is offered by post-humanist approaches influenced by Michel Foucault’s approach to biopolitics.The feminist philosopher, Rosi Braidotti argues that certain kinds of bodies – women, people of color, the “disabled” – have historically been excluded from the category of the “human.” She encourages embracing artistic modes of inquiry that do not simply reproduce a circumscribed concept of the human, but instead emphasize the embodied nature of experience. Braidotti asks us to consider how

Introduction  3

post-human feminism can articulate difference in the world. Specifically, for Undesign, certain “post-human” art and design practices make visible these differences in an attempt to undesign our relationship with a certain definition of the human, or even to contemplate how that human conceives of and lives with design. Finally, another thread in the articulation of alternative conceptions of design can be found in DIY and activist approaches. As the tools of design become widely accessible, there has been a significant rise of a DIY maker and craft culture, one which has also been brought into contact with hacker practices, and the combination has suggested a democratization of design as well as a way of undoing the hierarchies and structures that underpin the relationship between the professional designer and users/consumers.Von Busch (2009) uses the term “hacktivist” to refer to this space of social practices that connects amateur and professional to create “new hybrids” (see the chapter by Horton and Payne). As opposed to the critical orientation of movements, like Dunne’s critical and speculative design, the DIY maker cultures are orientated around emerging practices. These are seen in fields from fashion to informationcommunication technology (ICT), in which non-designers find new ways of plugging their own creations into existing infrastructures.This practice is, of course, enabled by, and continually redesigns, an ecosystem of new products, services and markets.

Conceptualizing undesign Undesign refers to more than a form of critical design. The prefix “un,” in this case, does not necessarily signal the negation of something as the inverse act of design. It can simultaneously be read as a lack of design, meaning that there is no design in the first place (as in “she left it undone,” or conversely unplanned development); it can imply the reversal of design (as in “she undid the knot,” or otherwise demolition and catastrophe – see the contribution of Kirsty Volz); or otherwise too much design (planned obsolescence, an excess of commodities, environmental overload, or the view of design as intrinsic to our productive capacity as well as to our very being: “we design, therefore we are”). Sometimes it is possible to achieve a better result by untying or undoing something. Undesign allows for this possibility, while also pointing to that which cannot be designed, the limits of design, the un-designable. Another impetus for the book, Undesign, comes from our experience of teaching in arts and design schools. Any consideration of the nexus, art-design, usually results in dichotomous formulations in which one side or the other is judged to be the bad relation because it lacks something the other possesses. For instance, based on what we have been arguing above, it is possible to imagine someone dismissing the teaching of design as simply adding more and more students to work in an already overly designed world. On the other hand, design is regarded as the functional solution to the frustrating lack of instrumental outcomes in the arts. In other words, the arts are viewed as a deficit compared to design’s utility. The dichotomous treatment of the art-design nexus is returning to structure the discourse surrounding the arts-design nexus in tertiary education, accompanied by a focus on the lack of cost effectiveness of the arts and its imperviousness to its “cost disease.”3 It is notable that a discrete undercurrent within this book deals with attempts to evade or deconstruct these dichotomies (see the contributions of Moline, Heiss, Roudavski, Gu and O’Connor). At the same time, undesign seeks to throw the spotlight on the teaching of design; it underscores how there cannot be design without undesign – that is, without being able to countenance how design is set up and for what ends. This includes contributing to an understanding of

4  Andrew McNamara, Gretchen Coombs and Gavin Sade

how design education is designed – for instance, how it operates within a functionally orchestrated curriculum oriented to student satisfaction, metrics and assuring students their design degree can translate into a professional practice. One of the provocations of this volume is to suggest taking up the challenge of undesigning design education (see the chapters by Haylock, Tonkinwise, Horton and Payne). Another alternative is to pursue the undesigning of design research, which is proposed by Betti Marenko, who seeks to place ‘the undesigned at the core of design itself,’ thus shifting the focus ‘from problem-solving to problem-finding.’ Undesign thereby emerged from discussions about the Janus face figure of design as looking both forward and back. Looking in one direction, design is wholly involved in the problem it seeks to address; yet – looking in the other direction of problems and incapacities – design methods are still invoked to solve the very problems of design. An ambition of Undesign, the publication, is to draw attention to practices that fall beyond affirmative design and design futuring (including interrogative, speculative and critical design) and which may even find a home in art schools and galleries. Thinking about practices operating at the intersection of art and design assisted the editors in conceptualizing undesign as an approach that straddled the aesthetic and the productive in order to dismantle some of the prevailing assumptions surrounding design. The call of submissions for Undesign generated over fifty submissions. In reviewing contributions, and discussing the conceptual threads of the volume, a perennial question arose for the editors in assessing the contributions, “how is that undesign?” In posing such a basic question, the editors would test (and contest) what the term meant.We understand that we cannot undesign everything. In many respects, for instance, we have followed a traditional design process by bringing this publication to a readership – a process that involves a publisher, coeditors, authors, edits, image permission requests, a peer review process, and further edits. The editorial process has taken over two years to complete, relatively long as far as academic books are concerned. Initially, we did not seek to formalize a definition of undesign. Instead, the editors left it open in order to see what responses to the proposition, “undesign,” would be elicited by the call for papers – often to the chagrin of some contributors, who wanted a more prescriptive definition. In retrospect, the editors feel this was a productive way of proceeding, even though it did not offer the solace of secure guidelines to work within. The chapters included have been selected for the clarity of their engagements with the conventional narratives of design. Each essay makes its own separate response to outlining the meaning of “undesign.” The editors recognized that the term itself is not entirely new and that other concepts, such as Fry’s notion of “defuturing,” are similar. Much to our surprise, during the process of editing the contributions, the University of Applied Arts in Vienna held an “Undesign Symposium” in 2016.4 The chief difference from other formulations has been to think about design in terms of what, if any, contributions art or artistic practices could offer when they saddle up next to critical design practices. Working without a prescriptive definition of our term, the editors noticed the enticement elicited an urge for change and to rethink certain taken for granted propositions about our world, our lives and design. The contributions seek to avoid the dualism of utopian/dystopian futures as well as the trope of the heroic designer, who delivers us from the problems of the world by granting us more design solutions. They often ask if other conceptualizations are possible if design is displaced as the central solution of living, thinking and doing. Another subsection of contributions focused on such propositions and also how design could be viably considered to exacerbate the problems it seeks to tackle. Brad

Introduction  5

Haylock asks, ‘What is Critical Design?’ and draws on continental philosophy to explore what is “critical” about critical design and therefore poses this question in the general context of contemporary design. Carl DiSalvo’s chapter, ‘A Statement for Attending to Diverse Economies Through Design Research,’ emphasizes the importance of decoupling theory and practice in design to make each more robust. Cameron Tonkinwise’s chapter, ‘ “I prefer not to”: Anti-progressive Designing,’ explores the impairing factor of design more intently and encourages designers to confront the destructive aspects of design in order to recuperate sustainable design practices. Undesign presents a series of different perspectives on design. One example is the exploration of how different cultural perspectives yield different insights into the usual understanding of design. Gu and O’Connor, for instance, suggest that the traditional division of art and design has a different function in China than in the West. This may involve different permutations of aesthetic autonomy and “dysfunctional undesign.” By exploring two different cases studies of site-specific art in China, they explore how the almost familiar undesign strategy of ‘drawing attention away from the reified end product and directing it toward the process of making’ allows local artists to question ‘the ethics of their creative activity,’ which also means “undesigning” the Western framework of aesthetic autonomy, not in order to abolish, but to reframe in a more “communal” orientation, including that of embracing audiences in shopping centers.This particular approach to site-specific work also means simultaneously questioning both Western impulses and internal Chinese pressures (for instance, ‘against the “controlled” and hierarchical art world in China’).Yoko Akama explains how her approach to relational design practice has been transformed by Japanese philosophies of absence. Akama’s chapter is one of a number of exploratory, practice-led formulations of undesign. Also included is another design practitioner, Leah Heiss, whose collaborative design practice moves between science, art and technology. Heiss’ practice asserts a working process to achieve design protocols for health and well-being. A similarly “creative” approach to the topic of undesign is offered by Joshua Singer, who seeks to “undesign” geographic space, offering an “ad hoc atlas” that straddles hacktivist and destructive aspects of design. Another strand of critical exploration could be said to respond to Krzystof Wodiczko’s call to put design in doubt by questioning if there is something in design, which is not design? Despite the often-well-intentioned search for solutions, Wodiczko calls to place design in doubt in order to explore, discover, and uncover the hidden dimensions of lived experience (Wodiczko 1999). In this volume, Anne Galloway and Catherine Caudwell respond to such a challenge by using their non-human ethnography to focus on how speculative design, without reinforcing affirmative design, draws attention to practices and ways of thinking beyond design and beyond the human. Similarly, Kirsty Volz asks what happens when design disappears, consumed by natural phenomena like a flood (a classic case of exploring the reversal of design, as mentioned in the outline of “undesign” above).The chapters also span a wide range of design fields from fashion to interactive design, yet they share a common focus in seeking to rethink design’s traditional practices, definitions and assumptions.The range of topics includes fashion design, which Horton and Payne argue presents a particularly interesting example because any critique of fashion is transformed into a fashion statement. Nonetheless, they explain how profound change is being ‘driven by clothing design on the margins.’ Their essay offers a fascinating history of the oscillations between fashion, capitalism and social critique. While some undesign practices attempt to confront the circumscription of the human – thus, showing how particular, dominant representations may stand in for and shortcut a

6  Andrew McNamara, Gretchen Coombs and Gavin Sade

universal designation – Undesign also acknowledges how universal presumptions, for instance, in the context of human rights activism, continue to play an important role.This gives a social and political dimension to undesign, particularly that which strives to “decolonize” design. This can be seen in the context of Mahmoud Keshavarz’s essay, ‘Undesigning Borders,’ which investigates how, in the notionally passport-free Schengen zone, some passports are freer than others. The point being, in this case, is not to discard propositions about human rights, but to challenge precisely where universality is circumscribed. Spyros Boyflatos’s chapter considers emergent grass roots movements and their relationship to activism and design. The discussion considers how design might create conditions that necessitate grass roots action, but also the how the emergence characteristics of grass roots activism might inform new ways of considering design. From Superstudio to artists like Wodiczko and so on to more contemporary critical designers like Dunne and Raby, this lineage of practice exists as an alternative to mainstream design. These designers began to redefine design outside of an exclusively commercial context, thus taking it in more social-aesthetic directions. Their work is often studied and encompassed within the academic field of design, but can sometimes resemble something found in an art gallery. By operating at the intersection of art and design, as well as engaging with contemporary life in a critical manner, these practices operate as provocative interventions within design thinking or within the designed environment. All the contributions gesture toward other ways of thinking about design, and more contentiously, question the centrality of design – or even seek to avoid thinking in terms of design at all. The nexus, art-design, as we have seen, is often envisaged as a dichotomy.Yet, the attempt to overcome the divide is a tendency that reaches back to Superstudio in the 1960s – which went from designing buildings to creating images, and their images could just as readily be considered within an art-historical framework as within a professional design field – and further back to the avant-garde groupings of the 1920s, such as Stijl, the Bauhaus, L’Esprit Nouveau and Russian Constructivism. Many of these groups sought to bridge the art-design divide, but also the divisions between art and design and society, science and technology. It will soon be one hundred years since Walter Gropius outlined the program for the Bauhaus, which sought to embrace a threefold collaboration of art, technology (craft) and science (theory). At one point, its rally cry converted into ‘art and technology: a new unity’ when it was pressed into exhibiting its wares. As Alain Findeli argues, this triad structure of unification went through a number of changes: at the New Bauhaus in Chicago it became more firmly focused on art, science and technology; whereas by the late 1950s the Ulm model eventually left art out completely. ‘Science and technology: a new unity’ could have been its slogan, Findeli notes wryly. Here the discussion of Katherine Moline is pivotal to explaining this history and its link to undesign. This raises the question of whether we can still envisage such a grand unity of aesthetic, social and design ambition anymore? The outcome is the currently dominant conception of design defined by a materialistic metaphysics, positivistic methods of inquiry, and an agnosticist, dualistic worldview’ (Findeli 2001: 5). Whereas Findeli advocates for the opposite: ‘new foundations for design education and research within a nonmaterialistic, non-positivistic, and non-agnosticist, non-dualistic worldview’ (Findeli 2001: 6). Motivating these ambitions to overcome such divisions, practitioners often had in mind aesthetic models of counter-organization, some of which included the notion of spontaneous configurations of self-organization. The most influential was Schiller’s conception of an aesthetic state: that is, a society of unity in difference, in which all individuals can realize their

Introduction  7

own potential and the state permits this possibility, enabling each individual to live harmoniously with others and with nature, while also seeking to mitigate the increasing specialization that separates different fields of inquiry from one another.5 Whereas for others it was a back to basics model – a return to some fantasy of genuine authenticity or reaching primordial roots. Everything that could go wrong with such propositions did go wrong, whether it is found in fascistic returns to a primordial national unity or the Khmer Rouge’s frenzied attempts to evade the alienation of modernity by returning to a Year Zero. This accusation is often laid at the feet of the environmental movement, or the sustainability argument: does its urge to recover lifestyles seek a naïve return to some utopia that could just as readily turn into a fundamentalist dystopia? Undesign practices cannot be naïve about this history. How does undesign avoid the apocalyptic inversions of this ambition that have previously gone haywire? Tonkinwise, for instance, usefully points to qualifications that avoid the seductive appeal to former glories with a more nuanced appeal: de-progressive design does not mean returning to how things were. It is firstly, not the entire lifeworld of a past that designers might seek to restore, only the more sustainable aspects. Secondly, the process of redesigning aspects of the past to re-take the place of the present that displaced them would entail reconfiguring those pasts; they would not arrive in the same form as they were previously. And thirdly, in most cases, what is being restored never entirely disappeared. (Tonkinwise chapter, page number to come) What does it mean then to consider the world differently? Undesign detours conventional design in order to explore that which cannot be designed, to consider that which is at the edge, not yet design: by undoing design, by deciding to not design. Thus, Undesign suggests a pause to the conventional assumption that all solutions require the application of more design. Conventional design thinking tends to presume that design offers the solution to any and all potential problems as well as providing the focus for an innovation-led improvement of the human world. Design may well offer solutions to many problems. However, the old saying still applies: to a person with a hammer everything looks like a nail. The fact that design is so frequently and automatically regarded as the answer to design shortcomings is the automatic response that undesign seeks to stall. If we agree that our world is highly designed in terms of the built environment, in all our virtual interactions and digital transactions, in our consumer behavior, in our everyday life and work patterns, then the provocation of Undesign is to force us to consider design more carefully and what it puts at risk. The provocation also challenges us to consider our own place in this world and what we are willing to risk, especially in terms of our own conceptions, which means reconsidering how our lives are designed and whether we might wish to envisage them otherwise.

Notes 1 In fact, Alain Findeli notes in his 2001 essay, ‘Rethinking Design Education for the 21st Century,’ that any ‘cursory look at recent literature and production in design’ would lead one to presume that ‘the general landscape is safe, quiet, and serene.’ Refer Findeli (2001): 5, opening sentence. 2 Refer to the notoriously well-known comments of Adolfo Natalini, one of the founders of Superstudio, in London in 1971: ‘if design is merely an inducement to consume, then we must reject design;

8  Andrew McNamara, Gretchen Coombs and Gavin Sade

if architecture is merely the codifying of bourgeois model of ownership and society, then we must reject architecture; if architecture and town planning [are] merely the formalization of present unjust social divisions, then we must reject town planning and its cities . . . until all design activities are aimed towards meeting primary needs. Until then, design must disappear.’ Cited in Ross K. Elfine, ‘Superstudio and the “Refusal to Work”,’ Design and Culture, 8:1: 55. 3 See the argument of Arun Sharma, ‘The Human Touch in An Automated World: Are the Creative Arts Ready to Respond?’ DDCA/NiTRO, September 26, 2016. www.ddca.edu.au/nitro/articles/2016/9/26/the-human-touch-in-an-automated-world-are-thecreative-arts-ready-to-respond Sharma cites the work of Bowen and Baumol on ‘cost disease,’ but both have warned against drawing hasty conclusions because cost cutting or reducing time spent on areas that require a high level of personal attention, such as education and health, actually ‘make the service worse,’ cited in Christopher Newfield (2016) The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press: 148. 4 We contacted the organizers to gauge whether there were any affinities with their symposium without success. 5 This is different to what the philosopher Frederick Bieser associates with the ‘sinister anachronistic interpretation of the aesthetic state as some kind of totalitarian regime that puts aesthetic over moral standards; one associates it with national-socialism. But this has nothing to do with the romantics, whose ideal of the aesthetic state has much more to do with the republican tradition (viz., Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau)’; see Richard Marshall, ‘Diotima’s Child: An interview with Frederick Bieser,’ 3:AM Magazine, September 2012. www.3ammagazine.com/3am/diotimas-child/

References Dunne, Anthony (2005), Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Elfine, Ross K. (2016), ‘Superstudio and the “Refusal to Work”,’ Design and Culture, 8:1: 55–77. Findeli, Alain (2001), ‘Rethinking Design Education for the 21st Century: Theoretical, Methodological and Ehtical Discussion,’ Design Issues, 17:1 (Winter): 5–17. Fry, Tony (1999), A New Philosophy Design: An Introduction to Defuturing, Sydney: UNSW Press. Fry, Tony (2008), Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice, Oxford: Berg. Superstudio (1973), Fragments from a Personal Museum, exhibition catalogue, Graz, Austria: Neue Galerie. Von Busch, Otto (2009), Becoming Fashion-able: Hacktivism and Engaged Fashion Design, Gothenburg: Camino. Wodiczko, Krzysztof (1999), Critical Vehicles:Writings, Projects and Interviews, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

1 WHAT IS CRITICAL DESIGN? Brad Haylock

The term ‘critical design’ describes design projects and practices that interrogate the status quo in various ways, or which propose variously unorthodox future scenarios.These practices are usually non-commercial and are often characterised by an ethic of social inquiry or activism. The term has seen wider usage in recent years, so it is timely to subject this idea to closer scrutiny.1 In other words, it is time to ask: what is critical design? The term ‘critical design’ – like the closely related term ‘speculative design’, which I also discuss in this chapter – is often associated with the work, writings and teaching of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, and with the work of their colleagues and students from the Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Art, London, during the years 2005 through 2015. For this reason, I use Dunne and Raby’s terminology as my starting point here. Although the discourse around critical design is growing in volume and sophistication, the literature to date does not deeply interrogate the concept of critical design in relation to established theories of critique and social change. So that critical design as a concept and as a practice might become more fully thinkable in terms of its radical capacity or its particular critical affordances, this chapter aims to synthesise current discourse on critical design with established discourses on critique. In so doing, I also aim to unshackle the term from its common association with the domains of industrial design, interaction design and electronic product design in the recent UK tradition, a close association that is unproductive because a vast many other types of design practice ought to be drawn into this debate. My approach here is principally genealogical. I avoid detailed discussions of examples from practice, focusing instead in this chapter upon covering a greater theoretical terrain.The title of this chapter is particularly telling with regard to my approach, and with regard to the philosophical lineage that I draw upon: the title refers to an important late-career lecture by the French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas, Michel Foucault. That lecture, titled ‘What is critique?’, from 1978,2 was a direct reference, in turn, to Immanuel Kant’s essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’, of 1784. In the present chapter, I commence with a short history of ideas of critique. I trace the roots of critical design, as an interrogative and emancipatory practice, back to continental Enlightenment philosophy – that historical moment in which philosophy, because it was then intermeshed with advances in the natural sciences and

10  Brad Haylock

mathematics, became unshackled from theology and instead championed reason and principles of human freedom and equality above received authority and custom. From this historical starting point, I synthesise contemporary discourse on critical design with key concepts from the field of design studies and from the Marxist philosophical tradition, and, later, with ideas drawn from post-Marxist political theory. Building upon all of this, I analyse the particular significance of critical design as a mode of critical practice.

What is critique? As mentioned above, the term ‘critical design’ in its present usage can be attributed to the writings of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby – first, Dunne’s doctoral thesis, which was later published as the book Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design (Dunne 2005), and second, the duo’s co-authored book Design Noir:The Secret Life of Electronic Objects (Dunne and Raby 2001). In the latter book, Dunne and Raby use the term ‘critical design’ to name a type of work that is counterposed, in their formulation, to the prevailing norms of design practice.They describe the majority of design practice as ‘affirmative design’, because most design work affirms the status quo. In more or less obvious ways, affirmative design reproduces prevailing systems and structures, including established power differences, types of human relationship, modes of political and economic organisation, workplace practices, and so on. In contrast, critical design ‘rejects how things are now as being the only possibility’ (Dunne and Raby 2001: 58). In summary, affirmative design perpetuates the status quo, while critical design interrogates it. Importantly, Dunne and Raby also describe a third category, ‘experimental design’, which ‘seeks to extend the medium, extending it in the name of progress and aesthetic novelty’ (2001: 58). ‘Experimental design’ names formal or technical avant-gardism – disruptive and unorthodox projects or practices that advance a discipline, but which do not demonstrate the kernel of social inquiry that would characterise critical design. To better understand the possible scope, logic and objectives of critical design, we can look to older and more established discourses surrounding critique in general and to critical theory in particular. Dunne and Raby have explicitly dissociated their work from critical theory and the Frankfurt School (2013: 35), but critical design should not be uncoupled from this lineage – this is too fruitful a literature to ignore if we are seeking to better understand what critical design is and might be. In this section, I therefore examine critical design in relation to Frankfurt School thinking, and to earlier and later ideas in the Marxist tradition. ‘The Frankfurt School’ is the name given to an amorphous group of social theorists and philosophers, many but not all of whom were associated with the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University, Frankfurt, during the interwar years and especially the post-war years of the twentieth century. Although it was founded in 1923, the Institute for Social Research is strongly associated with the work of Max Horkheimer, who became its director in 1930.3 Dunne and Raby’s distinction between affirmative design and critical design closely resembles Horkheimer’s distinction between traditional theory and critical theory: in the closing paragraph to his important essay, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ of 1937, Horkheimer argues that, in an ‘historical period like the present, true theory is more critical than affirmative’ (2002: 242). Critique is essentially an interrogative practice, an act of interrogation. It is a practice that casts things into doubt.4 Critical theory casts into doubt all established structures, truths and systems of value. In Horkheimer’s formulation, critical theory is a type of inquiry that takes

What is critical design?  11

society itself as its object (2002: 206). In his words, critical theory is ‘suspicious of the very categories of better, useful, appropriate, productive, and valuable, as these are understood in the present order, and refuses to take them as nonscientific presuppositions about which one can do nothing’ (2002: 207). Critical theory is thus not only an interrogative practice; it is also an emancipatory one. Critical theory, like other critical practices, seeks to unveil the workings of systems of exploitation and repression, with a view to making beneficial change thinkable and thus possible. Let us consider more closely the history of such a practice, and its underlying method and assumptions: how can critique be understood as a force for change? This is a disposition that has strong roots in continental thought, which can be traced back to the writings of Karl Marx, from the middle of the nineteenth century, and indeed earlier, to continental Enlightenment philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Enlightenment philosophy has its roots in the revolutions in science in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It embraced rationalism and equality, and broke from traditions rooted in mysticism and religion. In his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, from 1843, Marx emphasises the radicalism of German theory and its importance: by renouncing religious orthodoxy, Hegel’s late-Enlightenment philosophy reveals, Marx argues, that ‘for man the root is man himself ’ (1970: 137).What results, in Marx’s words, is a ‘categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected, contemptible being’ (1970: 137). From these roots in the Age of Enlightenment, in the eighteenth century in Western Europe, humankind finds itself responsible for its own destiny, instead of being answerable to any higher being or divine order.5 The categorical imperative arising from this philosophical event is most succinctly and most famously expressed in the eleventh of Marx’s theses on the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, in which he famously states: ‘[p]hilosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’ (Marx and Engels 1972: 123). Compare Marx’s words with those of Horkheimer, who argues that critical theory begins with an understanding that the entire social framework is ‘a function which originates in human action’, and which is therefore a ‘possible object of planful decision and rational determination’ (2002: 207). Critique, in the Marxist tradition, principally refers to ideology critique. In his best-known definition of ideology, from The German Ideology, Marx observes: ‘[t]he ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force’ (Marx and Engels 1972: 64). In Marxist thought, the concept of ideology in its various articulations – such as Louis Althusser’s well-known theory of ‘ideological state apparatuses’ (1971) – describes not only the prevailing values and ideas of a society but also the concomitant ‘false consciousness’ or masking operations through which these values and ideas, most notably the capitalist form of economic organisation and the status of the bourgeoisie as the ruling social class, are made to appear as natural, as universal, as ‘common sense’, or as if outside of history, thus halting historical progress. Myths, as described and interrogated by Roland Barthes, are one expression of ideology: ‘myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal’ (1973: 142). Critique is the antithesis of myth thus understood: critique is an unmasking (Entlarvung) operation that exposes the historical intention behind that which would appear as natural. Yet, how might such acts of unmasking lead to change? As Raymond Geuss concisely observes: ‘[c]ritical theories aim at emancipation and enlightenment, at making agents aware

12  Brad Haylock

of hidden coercion, thereby freeing them from that coercion and putting them in a position to determine where their true interests lie’ (1981: 55). Building on Geuss’s observation, it might be more specifically said that critique seeks emancipation through enlightenment.

An historically necessary tautology We have seen that critical theory is an historicising discipline – or a ‘relativising’ discipline, to use Horkheimer’s term (2002: 207). Critical theory, or critique generally, unveils, as an object of history and therefore of human intervention, that which might otherwise be mistaken as divine will, as transcendental, falsely understood as universal, as natural, or simply as ‘common sense’. Critique seeks to expose the human-made character of all social systems. On Marx’s reading, in the eighteenth century, Western philosophy shifts from its historical role as an interpretative discipline to become a change-oriented discipline. In other words, the imperative of philosophy in that moment changes from hermeneutics to design. A critical practice, such as critical theory, is one that exposes the fact that society is an object of historically relative design (and specifically an object of human design – not a universal of divine design).6 Understood this way, critique and design are thoroughly intermeshed. As such, it might be said that the term ‘critical design’ is a tautology. However, I wish to explore this apparent tautology and its contemporary significance. To clarify the correspondence between design and critique, we might compare Horkheimer’s thinking with that of an influential figure from the sphere of design studies, the American social scientist Herbert Simon. Simon (1996) proposed that, in contrast with the natural sciences, which are concerned with studying the world as it is, a science of design would be a ‘science of the artificial’, but also a discipline that would be concerned with the world as it ought to be. Marx had claimed that the point of philosophy is to change the world, and Horkheimer argued that the task of theory is not ‘the preservation of contemporary society but . . . its transformation into the right kind of society’ (2002: 218); Simon, in turn, infamously wrote that ‘[e]veryone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’ (1996: 111). Critique, including critical philosophy, critical theory and every other type of critical practice, is therefore also an act of design. If critique and design are both, at root, transformative practices, then the compound term ‘critical design’ is clearly tautological. Shouldn’t we just say ‘design’, or ‘critique’? Indeed, the contemporary design studies scholar Cameron Tonkinwise has argued that ‘[e]very time you qualify design with, or add design to, some other quality or practice, you are claiming that design does not already do that’ (2015: 13). He continues: All of the following phrases are redundant and/or appropriative of design: Design Futures, Design Fiction, Speculative Design, Critical Design, Adversarial Design, Discursive Design, Interrogative Design, Design Probes, Ludic Design. Design that does not already (imagine the) Future, (consider) Fiction, Speculate, Criticise, Provoke, (promote) Discourse, Interrogate, Probe, or Play is inadequate design. (2015: 13) In summary, following Tonkinwise, it could be said that ‘critical design’ is a redundant term, because any design project or practice that is not already critical is inadequate design. ‘Critical design’, in other words, is a tautology.

What is critical design?  13

However, departing from Tonkinwise, I would like to argue that the term ‘critical design’ is an historically necessary tautology. I will explain this by way of comparison with a similar term, specifically through reference to Stathis Gourgouris’s 2013 extrapolation of Edward Said’s 1984 concept of ‘secular criticism’. Addressing debates in American academic circles, Gourgouris unpacks Said’s term to emphasise the necessarily secular character of criticism. This is best explained through reference to Gourgouris’s distinction between secularism and secular criticism. Secularism is a theological pole, the opposite of religious fervour, whereas secular criticism is a critical practice with an impartially critical disposition (Gourgouris 2013: 12–15). Gourgouris emphasises: ‘it is an error to ignore the difference between secularism and secular criticism . . . because secularism is one of the objects [that is] taken to task . . . by secular criticism’ (2013: 14–15). Gourgouris notes that, although Said coined the term ‘secular criticism’, he never defined it. This is significant to our understanding of the concept, because this lack of definition emphasises the necessary fluidity of secular criticism as a practice. Gourgouris argues that secular criticism: is not a philosophical concept . . . upon which a hypothesis may credibly rest or out of which a set of commands may be issued. . . . [S]ecular criticism is not a theory but a practice. . . . To provide a definitional framework of secular criticism as theory would mean to set external and a priori rules for what would be secular and what would be critical about it, and this would defeat the intelligence of the practice on both grounds. (2013) Gourgouris’s work is important because it reveals that any critical practice worthy of the name should be radically secular: not only the act of interrogation but also that of selfinterrogation should be boundless. It is important to remind ourselves that critique ought to be radical, i.e., that it should aim to understand the root of a situation – recall Marx’s admiration of Hegel on account of the latter’s recognition that ‘for man the root is man himself ’. Yet, one need not append the term ‘secular’ to the term ‘criticism’ in order to make this point. The term ‘secular criticism’ is tautological because criticism is not true criticism when it is not radically secular. It is the confusion arising from the term’s tautological character that necessitates Gourgouris’s lengthy unravelling of the notion of secular criticism from that of secularism.Yet, ‘secular criticism’ is an important, historically necessary tautology, because it warns against critical practices that are inadequately impartial or inadequately self-reflective. One tautology thus rescues another. Like ‘secular criticism’, ‘critical design’ is tautological, but the latter term is especially vital in this historical moment because it points to a critical imperative that underlies the various practices that we call ‘design’, and because this is an imperative that is too rarely seen in practice.Tonkinwise rounds out his above-quoted polemic with an admission and a wish: despite having pointed to the redundancy of the phrases ‘design futures’, ‘design fiction’, ‘critical design’, etc., he notes that ‘[n]ot all (commercial) design does all those things, but it should’ (2015: 13). Herein lies the contemporary importance of ‘critical design’ as a term, as a concept and as a mode of practice. So long as a gap persists between, on the one hand, the aspirations that we hold for design and, on the other, its present reality, critical design will remain, as a term and as a concept, vital and historically necessary. To paraphrase Horkheimer, in an historical period like the present, true design is more critical

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than affirmative. Yet, so long as most design in this period fails to live up to – or even aspire to – its critical potential and instead merely affirms the status quo, the phrase ‘critical design’ will be anything but redundant.

Four orders of critical design Having argued that ‘critical design’ is an historically necessary term that describes an enduringly necessary type of practice, I would like now to discuss the modes of practice that might fall within this broad category. To understand the breadth of practices that might be understood as critical design, I draw upon Richard Buchanan’s well-known typology of four orders of design. These are: (1) symbolic and visual communications; (2) material objects; (3) activities and organised services; and (4) complex systems or environments for living, working, playing and learning (Buchanan 1992: 9–10).These can be associated respectively with the enduring disciplines of: (1) graphic or communication design; (2) industrial design; (3) interaction design, service design and logistics; and (4) architecture, urban planning and systems engineering. Breslin and Buchanan have elsewhere described these orders of design using the following pairings of the general discipline associated with each order and what designers make in each: (1) graphic design and symbols; (2) industrial design and things; (3) interaction design and actions; and (4) environmental design and thoughts (2008: 39). Building upon Buchanan’s work, and upon Breslin and Buchanan’s work, I propose four orders of critical design. I describe these here using just a few examples of each, but a great many more examples of current and past critical design practice could be evoked to describe each of these categories.That is to say, each of these orders of critical design could be (indeed most already have been) the focus of sustained, discrete study. The first order of critical design is critical communication design, which would include such practices as critical data visualisation, or interventionist communications in the manner of situationist practices of détournement. The website theyrule.net is an early twenty-firstcentury example of critical data visualisation: it unveils networks of power by making visible the connections between top companies in the US, based on shared directors.7 And, since 1989, the Adbusters Media Foundation has produced and published various situationist-like ‘spoof ads’ campaigning on such matters as alcohol, tobacco, fast food and politics, among the best-known of which are those featuring ‘Joe Chemo’, a cancer-stricken redrawing of the 1990s mascot of Camel cigarettes.8 The second order of critical design is critical design as it is most commonly understood today, spanning industrial design and electronic product design, including the work of Dunne and Raby and others in the RCA tradition (Dunne and Raby 2001; Dunne 2005; Dunne and Raby 2013), as well as related practices including ‘provotyping’ (provocative prototyping) projects, such as the ‘Sensitive Aunt’ provotype, which monitors indoor environments and provides suggestions for improved amenity or energy reduction using the passive-aggressive tone of a fussy aunt (Boer, Donovan et al. 2013). The third order of critical design would include practices in participatory and human- or ‘soft’-systems design practices, perhaps best represented by the Scandanavian participatory design tradition, which resists the status quo of design practices that are focused only on commercial innovation, and which rejects top-down models of design that ascribe the task of design only to expert consultants. Instead this approach prioritises inclusion, democracy

What is critical design?  15

and sustainability, and practices wherein trained practitioners act as facilitators of co-creative processes in which all stakeholders take part (Ehn, Nilsson et al. 2014). The fourth order of critical design would include critical practices in architecture (Hays 1984; Rendell, Hill et al. 2007) and other modes of critical spatial practice (Hirsch and Miessen 2012), reaching back to the work of 1960s and 1970s practices, such as Superstudio (Lang and Menking 2003), and further still to the ‘New Babylon’ project by Constant Nieuwenhuys (another situationist example). The fourth order of critical design would necessarily also include so-called ‘paper architecture’, i.e., unbuilt, speculative architectural works that propose ways in which we might live differently. Co-design and participatory design practices may also fall into this fourth order when they intervene in policy-making and the design of political systems. It is also possible to close the loop on these four orders of critical design. Breslin and Buchanan’s (2008) shorthand association of the fourth order of design with ‘thoughts’ may appear so general as to be unhelpful, but this in fact opens a productive space for discussion. Specifically, the fourth and first orders of critical design (thoughts and communication design, respectively) can be bridged if we consider publishing as a critical design practice. I would include here publishing practices that are expressly concerned with the democratisation of knowledge, with the advancement of literacy or analytic thinking, or with the dissemination of critical texts. Publishing thus understood has a rich history, spanning many centuries and many technologies. Some examples from the past century include: Penguin’s mass-market paperback publishing program in 1930s Britain, Semiotext(e)’s early translations of influential continental theory for Anglophone readers in the 1980s and 1990s, and Aaaarg.org, a contemporary platform for the sharing of digital copies of books (mostly relating to critical theory).

Preferred situations amidst possible futures We have established that critique and critical design are practices that work through enlightenment towards emancipation – they act in the present, with a view to orienting change towards a particular future.Yet, to better understand the political nuances of critique and the kinds of futures that it might point towards, I draw, in this section, upon related concepts from futures studies. As cited above, Herbert Simon observed that everyone who ‘devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’ is a designer.Yet, what might these preferred situations be? Turning to futures studies (a.k.a. ‘futurology’, among other descriptors), we find a set of categories more sophisticated than the binary of ‘existing’ and ‘preferred’. A number of authors in the futures fields have discussed four types of futures, expanding outward from the present, namely: possible, plausible, probable and preferable.9 Norman Henchey describes these categories thus: possible futures are what may be; plausible futures are what could be; probable futures are what will likely be; and preferable futures are what should be (Henchey 1978: 26).10 Trevor Hancock and Clement Bezold have visualised Henchey’s four types of futures in a diagram known as the ‘futures cone’ (Hancock and Bezold 1993; Hancock and Bezold 1994). The ‘futures cone’ diagram helps us to understand the relationship between Henchey’s different types of futures, and the relative scope and orientation of each. My appeal to the futures cone diagram in order to discuss design as a futuring practice is not an original move – Dunne and Raby reproduce a version of the futures cone in their book Speculative Everything (Dunne

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Possible Plausible Probable Dystopian Speculative Design Preferable Utopian Speculative Design Present Future

FIGURE 1.1 Types

of futures, showing speculative design as a critical practice, drawn by the author, adapted from Hancock and Bezold (1994)

and Raby 2013: 5) – but I recall this visualisation diagram because it allows us to better understand how speculative design can be a type of critical design.To Henchey’s formulation, Hancock and Bezold add ‘wildcards’. These are ‘dramatic and seemingly implausible changes that can occur very quickly’; they are ‘low-probability but high-impact events’ within the domain of the possible (Hancock and Bezold 1994: 24). Speculative design is a ‘wildcarding’ practice, it gives visual or material form to ‘wildcard’ futures that are possible but not probable. Speculative design can be understood as a type of critical design when it visualises a particular future that exposes something about the contingency of present situations or about the mutability of possible futures. With a nod to Matt Malpass’s related taxonomy (2013), I propose an analysis of the ways in which speculative design can be a critical practice. Speculative design is a type of critical design when it manifests visions of the future, whether utopian or dystopian. When utopian, speculative design manifests a positively defined vision of a preferable future.When dystopian, speculative design manifests a negatively defined vision of a preferable future by positively defining (typically in an amplified way) a future that might be possible but which would be decidedly not preferable. Utopian speculative design renders thinkable a range of preferable futures that might reside on or beyond the limits of the probable or even the plausible. Dystopian speculative design hints at preferable futures by conversely exposing undesirable futures that might be possible, plausible or even probable. Thus, as a mode of critical design, the logic of speculative design is that of reductio ad absurdum, ‘reduction to absurdity’, a classical form of argument in which one attempts to prove the truth of a statement by demonstrating that an untruth follows from its denial, or the falsity of a statement by demonstrating that an untruth follows from its acceptance.11 Dystopian speculative design attempts to prove the desirability of a preferable future by demonstrating the most undesirable scenarios that would follow from its denial, whereas utopian speculative design attempts to prove the desirability of a preferable future by demonstrating the most desirable scenarios that would follow from its acceptance. In either case, speculative design is a type of critical design because it exposes the future as subject to human intervention – it exposes the fact that the future, like any criterion of value in the present, is not, to restate Horkheimer’s words, a ‘nonscientific presupposition about which one can do nothing’.

What is critical design?  17

Critical design thus exposes the historical contingency of existing situations, but also the contingency of those futures that might variously reproduce or depart from the present status quo. Beyond Simon’s categories of ‘existing’ and ‘preferred’, future studies gives us an expanded conceptual apparatus that enables us to better understand the possibility and probability of various futures – a conceptual apparatus that, in other words, gives us a fuller picture of futurological contingency. Importantly, this conceptual apparatus also allows us to better interrogate the concepts of affirmative design and critical design. The category of probable futures exposes an error of logic or at least a slippage of language in Simon’s famous remark, because, while Simon’s words implicitly correlate inaction with undesirable futures and designed action with preferred ones, probable but undesirable futures can also be the result of design, and not merely the consequence of an unthinking reproduction of the status quo. Design is a normative act, a futuring discipline, a practice that is concerned with how one believes things should be, and yet a diversion from the status quo, a diversion from the reproduction of existing situations, although perhaps implied, is not guaranteed. Design comes with an ethical imperative, but ethical standpoints are radically plural and there is nothing to suggest that one’s preferred future situation will necessarily differ from the present status quo. A qualification to the argument I presented above is therefore necessary: the compound term ‘critical design’ is only on one, limited view a tautology. Its component terms are not synonymous. ‘Critical design’ is only in part a tautology because while critique entails a measure of design, design is not necessarily a critical practice (hence the need to distinguish between critical and affirmative design). To paraphrase Simon, everyone also designs who devises courses of action aimed at reproducing existing situations. The question is one of intentionality. Pace Tonkinwise, affirmative design is not a tautology, therefore nor is a critical design. The distinction between critical and affirmative design is squarely a political question, which I tackle in the coming section.

Design and hegemony Thus far, I have partly synthesised a Marxist critique of ideology with concepts from future studies, however a problem remains: there is a contradiction between the range of possible futures discussed in the previous section and the mostly classically Marxist lines of thinking that were the theoretical touchstones for my earlier consideration of the question ‘what is critique?’. The problem, specifically, is this: Marxism classically pursues a single historical end, however this is incompatible with the plurality of possible futures that futurology renders thinkable. To properly undertake a critique of critical design, a more nuanced understanding of the political conditions of contemporary critical practice is necessary. I address this impasse through an interrogation of the points of continuity and the points of difference between Marxist and post-Marxist schools of thought, and specifically with a consideration of the difference between a Marxist conception of ideology and a post-Marxist reading of hegemony. Although strategies are debated among its different camps, classical Marxism holds that the overthrow of capitalism will lead to higher orders of social organisation, along an historical trajectory from feudalism, through capitalism, to socialism and then communism. The problem with this in relation to an analysis of critical design lies with the fact that ideology in the Marxist tradition is typically associated with the alienating expression of the cultural and intellectual values of a single ruling class (the bourgeoisie), and thus ideology critique is cast as an instrument in a single historical counter-narrative. As Douglas Kellner has noted, models

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of Marxist cultural theory dominant in the twentieth century present ‘ideology critique as the demolition of bourgeois culture and ideology, thus, in effect, conflating bourgeois culture and ideology’ (Kellner 1997: 82). By conflating bourgeois culture and ideology, the Marxist tradition permits only two possible futures, only two outcomes from the failure or success of critique respectively: the eternal return of capitalism, or progress towards communism. If we give credence to the futurological concepts discussed in the previous section, we require an understanding of politics that instead admits a plurality of possible futures. By the end of the twentieth century, classical Marxism had been thoroughly called into question, in the wake of such events as the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and in the context of intellectual developments such as post-structuralism, postmodernism and second-wave feminism (Stuart 2000: 4).Yet, while we might be sceptical of the teleology of classical Marxism, we need not jettison all of its conceptual and critical apparatuses. The poles of ideology and critique are, respectively, naturalising and historicising operations, but they need not refer only to a bipartisan historical struggle between a present bourgeois culture and a future communist utopia. Instead, these can also be understood as operations that seek to perpetuate or interrogate various stati quo in relation to what Antonio Gramsci calls ‘hegemony’, or a ‘war of position’ (1971). Many later thinkers recognise Gramsci’s theory of hegemony as an astute description of the processes of domination in late-capitalist societies. Unlike ideology classically understood, the concept of hegemony admits that the dominant force in society might be not a single class but a constellation of social classes, class factions or other social groupings which, through ‘provisional alliances’, can exert authority over subordinate groups (Hebdige 1993: 366). Importantly, the concept of hegemony entails that this authority is inevitably contingent or unstable: Hegemony is not simple ‘class rule’. It requires to some degree the ‘consent’ of the subordinate class, which has, in turn, to be won and secured. . . . It has to be won, worked for, reproduced, sustained. Hegemony is, as Gramsci said, a ‘moving equilibrium’ containing ‘relations of forces favourable or unfavourable to this or that tendency’. (Clarke, Hall et al. 2006: 30) Building on Gramsci’s work, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have proposed a conception of hegemony that departs once and for all from a Marxist teleology by emphasising the radical contingency of every hegemonic articulation or provisional alliance, through their concept of ‘antagonism’. The concept of antagonism can be understood as a transposition of the Lacanian category of ‘the Real’ into socio-political analysis (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 129).12 The Real is that which is opposed, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, to the categories of the Imaginary and the Symbolic – it is ‘that which resists symbolization’ (Žižek 2003: 2), or, more poetically, ‘the Real is the rock upon which every attempt at symbolization stumbles’ (Žižek 1989: 169). The concept of the Real names the limit of human experience; correspondingly, the concept of antagonism names an irrepressible limit of the social that expresses itself as the inevitability of conflict or tension between competing social groups or ‘adversaries’ in a democratic social formation. On this view, a conflict-free society is impossible because the spectre of antagonism will inevitably emerge as some kind of irreconcilable difference between different social groupings: ‘[s]ociety never manages fully to be society, because everything in it is penetrated by its limits, which prevent it from constituting itself as an objective reality’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 127). This theoretical perspective emphasises an understanding of hegemony in

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which there can be no end to the movement of the ‘moving equilibrium’, and which forecloses the possibility of consensus that underpins many theories of democracy. Mouffe later names this ‘agonistic democracy’ (Mouffe 2005). If hegemonic orders need always to be won, worked for, and reproduced, we must attend also to their counterpart, namely the counter-hegemonic practices that challenge prevailing situations: ‘[e]very hegemonic order is susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices – practices that will attempt to disarticulate the existing order so as to install another form of hegemony’ (Mouffe 2008: 9). Critical design is just such a practice.13 It is a mode of counter-hegemonic disarticulation that acts upon the present, whether directly, in the tradition of critical practices that seek to enlighten a population about the state of a situation, or indirectly, by rendering preferable futures thinkable. In other words, critical design can reveal contradictions in present situations, thus unmasking the historical contingency of hegemonic orders that presently appear as natural, or it can reveal as merely probable futures that might otherwise appear as inevitable. The concept of hegemony thus allows us to synthesise concepts drawn from the literature on ideology critique with those drawn from futurology, in order to better understand design as a mode of critical practice.

Conclusion: more than half-enlightenment In this chapter, I have presented a survey of discourse on critique, so that we might better understand critical design and its relationship to past practices of critique, particularly ideology critique in the Marxist tradition, which, in turn, has its roots in Enlightenment thought. I have argued that the term ‘critical design’ is, on one view, a tautology, but also that it is an historically necessary term, and one that will remain necessary so long as most design practice affirms the status quo. I have argued that the term ought to be used to describe not only practices in the domain of industrial design, interaction design or electronic product design, but that it can and should also be deployed to describe critical practices in the realms of visual communication and publishing, system design, and architecture and planning. I have summarised key concepts from the field of future studies to emphasise the ways in which critical and speculative design can help to direct us towards preferable futures. I have summarised post-Marxist theories of hegemony to describe how critical design can be understood as a counter-hegemonic practice, so that a discussion of critical design can draw upon all that we know about critique whilst avoiding the problems that arise from the teleology of classical Marxism. In concluding, I would like to build upon all of the above to describe the particular potency of design as a critical practice. Although design has received little attention in the literature with regard to the concepts of hegemony and agonism, Chantal Mouffe has previously discussed the importance of art as a counter-hegemonic practice (Mouffe 2008). Drawing upon the work of Richard Noble (2005), Mouffe identifies four types of critical art: (1) art that directly engages with political reality; (2) art that explores marginal, othered or oppressed subjectivities; (3) art that interrogates its own conditions of production and display, i.e., institutional critique; and (4) ‘art as utopian experimentation, attempts to imagine alternative ways of living’ (2008: 12–13). Design, too, can function in each of these ways: nothing is lost if we read ‘design’ for ‘art’ in the above. It is the fourth of these categories, however, which is the most important here, since design is uniquely well placed to be a practice of ‘utopian experimentation’. To understand the significance of this fourth category, I look to the model of ideology critique

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championed by Ernst Bloch, who argued that ‘we must look beyond a partial, superficial form of enlightenment’ (Bloch 1998: 296). As Douglas Kellner summarises, Bloch distinguishes ‘half-enlightenment’ or ‘partial enlightenment’ from ‘genuine enlightenment’ (Kellner 1997). On Bloch’s analysis, ideology critique should not merely be an exposition and denunciation of mechanisms of mystification: Bloch would dismiss [a] merely denunciatory approach to ideology critique as ‘halfenlightenment’, which he compares to genuine enlightenment. Half-enlightenment ‘has nothing but an attitude’, i.e. rationalistic dismissal of all mystification, superstition, legend, and so on. . . . Genuine enlightenment, on the other hand, criticizes any distortions in an ideological product, but then goes on to take it more seriously, to read it closely for any critical or emancipatory potential. Half-enlightenment deludes itself, first, by thinking that truth and enlightenment can be obtained solely by eliminating error rather than offering something positive and attractive. (Kellner 1997: 83) Reframing this in relation to Mouffe’s concept of agonistic democracy, the threads of emancipatory potential that one might extract from an ideological product are the implicit utopian promises which are necessary to sustain any hegemonic order, but which can also be mobilised in a critical or counter-hegemonic project through their rearticulation towards another possible future. As Mouffe herself observes, every apparent consensus or provisionally stable hegemonic order is based upon some form of exclusion, and so ‘[t]here are always other possibilities that have been repressed and that can be reactivated’ (Mouffe 2008: 9).14 As compared to other critical practices that might be characterised as mere ‘halfenlightenment’, critical design can be understood as a particularly potent form of critique – a technique of ‘genuine enlightenment’ – because it is unusually well placed to not only ‘reject how things are now as being the only possibility’, but also to ‘offer something positive and attractive’. Critical design – particularly utopian speculative design, as I have described it above – stands to be an especially effective means by which one might propose preferable futures for democratic consideration and debate, thus reactivating those ‘other possibilities’ that are repressed by a prevailing hegemonic order. In his lecture ‘What is Critique?’, Foucault eloquently described critique as ‘the art of not being governed quite so much’ (1997: 45). By contrast, critical design, which benefits from the heritage of critique in general but which is particularly well placed to render preferable futures thinkable, might be acknowledged as an art of imagining other forms of governance entirely.

Notes 1 Recent texts discussing critical design include, but are not limited to: Dunne, Anthony and Fiona Raby (2001) Design Noir:The Secret Life of Electronic Objects, Basel, Boston & Berlin: Birkhäuser, Dunne, Anthony (2005) Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Kyes, Zak and Mark Owens, eds. (2007) Forms of Inquiry: The Architecture of Critical Graphic Design, London: Architectural Association, Kyes, Zak and Mark Owens (2009) ‘Forms of Agency’, in Iaspis Forum on Design and Critical Practice – The Reader, edited by M. Ericson, M. Frostner, Z. Kyes, S. Teleman and J. Williamsson, Stockholm, Berlin and New York, Iaspis and Sternberg Press: pp. 314–351, Poyner, Rick (2009) ‘Design Thinking or Critical Design?’, in Now Is the Time: Art & Theory in the 21st Century, edited by J. Bouwhuis, I. Commandeur, G. Frieling et al., Rotterdam, NAI Publishers: pp. 115–124, Ericson, Magnus and Ramia Mazé (2011) Design Act: Socially

What is critical design?  21

and Politically Engaged Design Today – Critical Roles and Emerging Tactics, Berlin & New York: Sternberg Press, Dunne, Anthony and Fiona Raby (2013) Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Auger, James (2013) ‘Speculative Design: Crafting the Speculation’, Digital Creativity 24(1): 11–35, Malpass, Matt (2013) “Between Wit and Reason: Defining Associative, Speculative, and Critical Design in Practice”, Design and Culture 5(3): 333–356, Moline, Katherine (2014) ‘Dingo Logic: Feral Experimental and New Design Thinking’ in Feral Experimental: New Design Thinking, edited by K. Moline, Sydney, UNSW Art & Design, pp. 6–11, Malpass, Matt (2015) “Criticism and Function in Critical Design Practice”, Design Issues 31(2): 59–71, Malpass, Matt (2018) Critical Design in Context: History,Theory, and Practices, London: Bloomsbury. 2 This lecture is reproduced as: Foucault, Michel (1997) ‘What is Critique?’ in The Politics of Truth, edited by S. Lotringer, Los Angeles, Semiotext(e): pp. 41–81. 3 For a history of the Frankfurt School, see: Jay, Martin (1996) The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 4 The idea that critique ‘casts things into doubt’ is a turn of phrase borrowed from Stathis Gourgouris, whose work I discuss below. 5 Or, more accurately, this is the Western version of the narrative of emancipation through enlightenment. 6 See also: Groys, Boris (2010) ‘The Obligation to Self-Design’, in Going Public, Berlin and New York, Sternberg Press: pp. 21–37. 7 theyrule.net was launched by Josh On in 2001 using static data gathered from the websites of the top 100 US companies. It was updated in 2004 to include data from the top 500 US companies, and was rebuilt again in 2011 to use live data from littlesis.org, allowing access to information about connections between the boards of directors of the top 1000 US companies. See: www.theyrule. net/about, accessed 13 June 2016. 8 See: Adbusters, ‘Spoof Ads’, www.adbusters.org/spoofads/, accessed 13 June 2016. 9 The key authors in this field are Norman Henchey and, after him, Trevor Hancock and Clement Bezold, but, in addition to these authors, whose work is discussed in detail in this section, see also: Bell, Wendell and Jeffrey K. Olick (1989) “An Epistemology for the Futures Field”, Futures 21(2): 115–135, Bell, Wendell (1998) “Making People Responsible: The Possible, the Probable, and the Preferable”, American Behavioral Scientist 42(3): 323–339, Voros, Joseph (2001) “A Primer on Futures Studies, Foresight and the Use of Scenarios”, Prospect, the Foresight Bulletin (6),Voros, Joseph (2003) “A Generic Foresight Process Framework”, Foresight 5(3): 10–21, Barber, Marcus (2006) “Wildcards – Signals from a Future Near You”, Journal of Futures Studies 11(1): 75–94. 10 A concern with categories such as these has much older roots – in his Poetics, for example, Aristotle declared that the poet ‘should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities’ Epps, Preston Herschel (1942) The Poetics of Aristotle, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 11 On the topic of reductio ad absurdum in relation to design, see: Dunne, A. (2012) ‘Interaction Design vs. Designing Interactions’, Interaction 12. Dublin, Ireland. 12 As Žižek notes, ‘Laclau and Mouffe were the first to develop this logic of the Real in its relevance for the social-ideological field in their concept of antagonism: antagonism is precisely such an impossible kernel, a certain limit which is in itself nothing; it is only to be constructed retroactively, from a series of its effects, as the traumatic point which escapes them; it prevents a closure of the social field’. (Žižek, Slavoj 1989: 164) The Sublime Object of Ideology, London & New York:Verso. 13 With respect to critical practices in design, Carl DiSalvo has drawn upon Mouffe’s work to develop his notion of ‘adversarial design’: DiSalvo, Carl (2012) Adversarial Design, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 14 The significance of offering something positive and attractive applies to the project of democracy itself: this theme is echoed in Žižek argument that the universal notion of democracy is a ‘ “necessary fiction” . . . in the absence of which effective democracy, in all the plurality of its forms, could not reproduce itself ’ (Žižek 1989: 148–149).

References Althusser, Louis (1971) ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes Towards an Investigation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York, Monthly Review Press: pp. 85–126. Auger, James (2013) “Speculative Design: Crafting the Speculation.” Digital Creativity 24(1): 11–35. Barber, Marcus (2006) “Wildcards – Signals from a Future Near You.” Journal of Futures Studies 11(1): 75–94.

22  Brad Haylock

Barthes, Roland (1973) Mythologies, St Albans, Herts: Granada. Bell,Wendell (1998) “Making People Responsible:The Possible, the Probable, and the Preferable.” American Behavioral Scientist 42(3): 323–339. Bell, Wendell and Jeffrey K. Olick (1989) “An Epistemology for the Futures Field.” Futures 21(2): 115–135. Bloch, Ernst (1998) Literary Essays, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Boer, Laurens, Jared Donovan, et al. (2013) “Challenging Industry Conceptions with Provotypes.” CoDesign 9(2): 73–89. Breslin, Maggie and Richard Buchanan (2008) “On the Case Study Method of Research and Teaching in Design.” Design Issues 24(1): 36–40. Buchanan, Richard (1992) “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking.” Design Issues 8(2): 5–21. Clarke, John, Stuart Hall, et al. (2006) ‘Subcultures, Cultures and Class’, in Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, edited by S. Hall and T. Jefferson, London & New York, Routledge: pp. 3–59. DiSalvo, Carl (2012) Adversarial Design, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dunne, Anthony (2005) Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dunne, Anthony (2012) “Interaction Design vs. Designing Interactions.” Interaction 12. Dublin, Ireland. Dunne, Anthony and Fiona Raby (2001) Design Noir:The Secret Life of Electronic Objects, Basel, Boston & Berlin: Birkhäuser. Dunne, Anthony and Fiona Raby (2013) Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ehn, Pelle, Elisabet M. Nilsson, et al. (2014) Making Futures: Marginal Notes on Innovation, Design, and Democracy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Epps, Preston Herschel (1942) The Poetics of Aristotle, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ericson, Magnus and Ramia Mazé (2011) Design Act: Socially and Politically Engaged Design Today – Critical Roles and Emerging Tactics, Berlin & New York: Sternberg Press. Foucault, Michel (1997) ‘What Is Critique?’ in The Politics of Truth, edited by S. Lotringer, Los Angeles, Semiotext(e): pp. 41–81. Geuss, Raymond (1981) The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gourgouris, Stathis (2013) Lessons in Secular Criticism, New York: Fordham University Press. Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, New York: International Publishers. Groys, Boris (2010) ‘The Obligation to Self-Design’, in Going Public, Berlin & New York, Sternberg Press: pp. 21–37. Hancock, Trevor and Clement Bezold (1993) An Overview of the Health Futures Field, Geneva: WHO Health Futures Consultation. Hancock, Trevor and Clement Bezold (1994) “Possible Futures, Preferable Futures.” The Healthcare Forum Journal 37(2): 23–29. Hays, K. Michael (1984) “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form.” Perspecta 21: 15–29. Hebdige, Dick (1993) ‘From Culture to Hegemony’, in The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by S. During, London & New York, Routledge: pp. 357–367. Henchey, Norman (1978) “Making Sense of Future Studies.” Alternatives 7(2): 24–28. Hirsch, Nikolaus and Markus Miessen, eds. (2012) What Is Critical Spatial Practice? Critical Spatial Practice, Berlin: Sternberg Press. Horkheimer, Max (2002) Critical Theory: Selected Essays, New York: Continuum. Jay, Martin (1996) The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kellner, Douglas (1997) ‘Ernst Bloch, utopia and ideology critique’, in Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, edited by J. O. Daniel and T. Moylan, London & New York,Verso: pp. 80–95. Kyes, Zak and Mark Owens, eds. (2007) Forms of Inquiry: The Architecture of Critical Graphic Design, London: Architectural Association.

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Kyes, Zak and Mark Owens (2009) ‘Forms of Agency’, in Iaspis Forum on Design and Critical Practice – The Reader, edited by M. Ericson, M. Frostner, Z. Kyes, S. Teleman and J. Williamsson, Stockholm, Berlin & New York, Iaspis and Sternberg Press: pp. 314–351. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe (2001) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London & New York:Verso. Lang, Peter and William Menking (2003) Superstudio: Life Without Objects, Milan: Skira. Malpass, Matt (2013) “Between Wit and Reason: Defining Associative, Speculative, and Critical Design in Practice.” Design and Culture 5(3): 333–356. Malpass, Matt (2015) “Criticism and Function in Critical Design Practice.” Design Issues 31(2): 59–71. Malpass, Matt (2018) Critical Design in Context: History,Theory, and Practices, London: Bloomsbury. Marx, Karl (1970) Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1972) The German Ideology, New York: International Publishers. Moline, Katherine (2014) ‘Dingo Logic: Feral Experimental and New Design Thinking’, in Feral Experimental: New Design Thinking, edited by K. Moline, Sydney, UNSW Art & Design: pp. 6–11. Mouffe, Chantal (2005). On the Political, London & New York: Routledge. Mouffe, Chantal (2008) “Art and Democracy: Art as an Agnostic Intervention in Public Space.” Open (14): 6–15. Noble, Richard (2005) ‘Imagining the Political: Some Provisional Thoughts on Art and Politics’, in The Showroom Annual 2003/04, London, The Showroom. Poyner, Rick (2009) ‘Design Thinking or Critical Design?’ in Now is the Time: Art & Theory in the 21st Century, edited by J. Bouwhuis, I. Commandeur, G. Frieling et al., Rotterdam, NAI Publishers: pp. 115–124. Rendell, Jane, Jonathan Hill, et al., eds. (2007) Critical Architecture, London: Routledge. Simon, Herbert A. (1996) The Sciences of the Artificial, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stuart, Sim (2000) Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History, London & New York: Routledge. Tonkinwise, Cameron (2015) ‘Just Design: Being Dogmatic about Defining Speculative Critical Design Future Fiction’, in Experimental Thinking/Design Practices, edited by K. Moline and P. Hall, Brisbane, Griffith University Art Gallery: p. 13. Voros, Joseph (2001) “A Primer on Futures Studies, Foresight and the Use of Scenarios.” Prospect, the Foresight Bulletin (6). Voros, Joseph (2003) “A Generic Foresight Process Framework.” Foresight 5(3): 10–21. Žižek, Slavoj (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology, London & New York:Verso. Žižek, Slavoj (2003) ‘General Introduction’, in Jacques Lacan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, edited by S. Žižek Volume 1, London & New York, Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice: pp. 1–3.

2 NOTES ON MORE-THAN-HUMAN ARCHITECTURE Stanislav Roudavski

Introduction What can the creation of artificial habitats to replace old-growth forests tell us about the process, value and future of design? This chapter takes a concrete and provocative example and demonstrates its implications for modest, engaged and imperfect processes, which, it is argued, call for the rethinking of design as a gradual, ecological action. To illustrate this understanding, the chapter begins with a description of a proposal to provide artificial habitats for wild animals. The action of designing these habitats, which includes replacing rapidly disappearing old-growth trees with artificial structures, puts in doubt habitual assumptions about the clients, procedures and goals of design. This example is of relevance to all design for at least two reasons. First, because the task of providing artificial habitats to nonhuman forms of life is going to become increasingly common as the environment requires more management under the influence of such phenomena as global warming or urbanisation. And second, because all design necessarily impinges on existing ecosystems and should aim to benefit nonhuman as well as human stakeholders. The creation of artificial structures in place of natural habitats is described in this chapter as an incitement that highlights the need for further collaboration, for the integration of existing knowledge and for new research. With the resulting questions in hand, the chapter proposes the need for practice-oriented reconsiderations of values, participants and methods of design. It concludes with a proposal for an attitude of modesty in the face of the overwhelming (available and incoming) information as well as in the presence of an even greater and sometimes unbridgeable ignorance induced by interactions with nondeterministic, volatile and incompletely controllable natural systems (Merchant, 2016). The dilemma of design in these conditions is in the tension between its remit to act, and act now, and the uncertainty that inescapably underlies any purposeful change and any creative endeavour.

Design challenges This chapter argues that design encounters one important and insufficiently understood challenge: the need to design for all biosphere, for all life, within ecosystems. To illustrate this challenge, this section refers to an approach that proposes to design artificial habitats for

Notes on more-than-human architecture  25

nonhuman clients that live in the trees. This type of project is a largely uncharted ground, where the very actors, such as trees, are “not easily defined or at least are definable in many different ways.” (Hallé et al., 1978, p. 1) Therefore, the purpose here is not to share ready recipes or advocate for best practices but, instead, to challenge habitual approaches to design so that they could be reconsidered from first principles. * * * When large trees are lost – to harvesting, agriculture, safety concerns in urban environments or other causes – tree-dwelling animals such as birds, bats and insects lose their habitats and the local ecosystem disintegrates.The planting of new trees to replace the old ones does not resolve the problem because the young trees cannot provide appropriate conditions (Gibbons and Lindenmayer, 2002; Le Roux et al., 2015). Large trees take hundreds of years to mature and develop adequate habitat features such as large canopies, cavities, fallen branches and peeling bark.The combined effect of such features makes large old trees function as biodiversity hotspots or ‘keystone structures’ in the surrounding ecosystems (Manning et al., 2006).The tree example is far from unique. On the contrary, the presence of suitable physical structures is important to many forms of life in a broad variety of situations. For example, wetlands (Tews et al., 2004) and reefs (Kerry and Bellwood, 2015) also act as keystone structures in their ecosystems. When a large old tree is gone, a replacement for it might be provided artificially. Provision of artificial habitats has been attempted in marine environments, for example, in the case of artificial reefs (Baine, 2001) and in other marine structures built as ecological habitats (Bulleri and Chapman, 2015) including artificial shorelines (Browne and Chapman, 2011), fish aggregation devices and artificial seagrasses. More recently, this approach has been attempted in the work of Le Roux for the Australian Capital Territory’s Parks and Conservation Service, with artificially constructed props or reused dead trees. It is likely that such artificial replacements of natural structures will be increasingly necessary, or at least conceivable, as viable tactics in the challenge of managing environments. Artificial objects can and already do support many species and should be taken into account in the work of conservation, regeneration and management of novel ecosystems. Such incorporation will require further research on how such structures impact the environment and relate to the functioning of human societies. The job of providing habitat structures is familiar to architects whose profession is expressly dedicated to the regulation of dwelling, typically through physical structures. However, the established architectural-design practices focus on human needs and judge designs according to human criteria for success. If this anthropocentric focus is abandoned, the goal of facilitating habitation for all life emerges as a logical broadening of existing architectural work. However, the implementation of such broadening is far from trivial and requires further theorisation and practical experimentation.

Design contributions It is increasingly recognised that “being mindful of all those who have or may have an interest in valuing what has already been created” is “far more important” than creativity. (Sless, 2012) Consequently, the challenges of design that integrates into ecosystems are already taken up by a range of disciplines including ecology and engineering. The names of relevant subfields proliferate: environmental engineering, biotechnology, ecotechniques, cleaner technology, industrial ecology, synthetic ecology, biomanipulation, restoration ecology, river and lake

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restoration, bioengineering, wetland restoration, sustainable agroecology, reclamation ecology, habitat reconstruction, nature engineering, ecohydrology, ecotechnology, ecosystem rehabilitation, engineering ecology, biospherics, solar aquatics. And yet, as the specialists readily acknowledge, the productive communication between disciplines predominantly responsible for understanding (such as ecology) and those mostly responsible for action (such as engineering) is insufficient (Mitsch, 2014). In these conditions, what can design disciplines proper, such as architecture, contribute in addition to the scientific and technical work already under way? * * * From corporate skyscrapers in the desert to sport cars on public roads and throw-away smartphones, design can be seen as an exuberant expression of consumerist excesses. Understood as such, design is a practice to overcome, with time and at a cost, like fossil-fuel energy sources or plastic bags in supermarkets. It is a burden for the ecology, what Ingersoll calls “building against nature” (2012, p. 574), and Tonkinwise proposes to design out of existence (2014, p. 198). This chapter takes a contrasting standpoint that sees design as (first) an unavoidable and (second) a potentially useful set of practices. This optimistic appreciation dissociates design from the making of desirable products and, instead, sees it as a practice that investigates the unknown by sampling possible future states. This understanding is concerned with situations where the path from the existing conditions to a preferred future state is not known; if the necessary steps are clear, designing is not required. This type of designing occurs in many existing fields, such as those already mentioned above. For example, many aspects of scientific work require designing but the primary emphasis in physical, natural or social sciences is on the study of the existing world. Where such studies focus on a proposal for the future, for example in many subfields of engineering, the scientific methods become supplanted by or complimented by those typical for design. This understanding is an effort to abandon associations of design with fussy cleverness that creates a world where everything is overdesigned, or exclusivity that helps to sell luxury. By contrast, design can mean “designing of nothing” (Fry, 2008, p. 71) and this chapter highlights the outcomes of design that are to do with systemic changes rather than with material objects. For example, a prosthetic habitat might be valued as an object but its primary purpose is to bridge a gap in a habitable world left by a felled large old tree, ideally disappearing after the job is done or, at least withdrawing into a modest, supporting role. In this case, the outcome is a self-supporting autonomy of an ecosystem. Design can also mean metadesign (e.g., see Wood, 2007), understood as a mode of politics that seeks to go beyond that which is commonly thought possible. This attitude might choose to create an artificial habitat that is deliberately provocative, not to achieve a desirable commodity but, instead, to solicit an informative response or campaign for attention and care. The outcome of such design might be intentionally grotesque, morally questionable and, sometimes, not fully functional, only imagined and or even impossible.

Design values The reorientation of design from commodities, conveniences, prestige and associated marketing towards moral issues: choice, constraints, sharing, fairness or justice necessitates an engagement with values, a kind of design-philosophical experimentation. The purpose of

Notes on more-than-human architecture  27

such experimentation has to be stretch-testing or replacement of the familiar concept in the actual field conditions of today, and – more importantly – of tomorrow. To illustrate, the idea of ‘nature’ is one of such concepts, obviously central to the above challenge of providing artificial replacements habitats.Yet, “[r]estoration of wild places in the Anthropocene depends on valuing multiple forms of wildness, including novel anthropogenic forms that have yet to be imagined.” (Cantrell et al., 2017) As Fry remarks (Fry, 2012, p. Part II.6.Passing Figures of Technology), “ ‘we’ now exist in two kinds of intertwining ‘natures’: the biological and the technological. Both ‘natures’ are governed by specific but inherently internal processes (over which ‘we’ have very limited and diminishing control).”This diminishment of control stems from the intrinsically unpredictable behaviour of such complex systems as societies, technologies or nature. In itself, humans’ inability to attain full control is not positive or negative. It can be experienced as a form of liberation from the drive to some all-unifying approach but can also be threatening with impending large-scale disasters such as those that might be triggered by continuing global warming. In these conditions of limited control, it is necessary to move from mechanistic accounts of the environment to a consideration of its ongoing autopoiesis in the context of extended hybrid communities.The reframing of design practices that is necessary for this move will shift attention from human-centred design to more open-ended goals that will imply rethinking the very composition of the world and can thus be described as ‘ontological design.’ Given that all technology emerges through design, it is also useful to acknowledge that entities created through designing exert influence in ways that extend well beyond specifications imposed by design briefs. As evidenced by recent trends, for example those that emphasise strategic design or social innovation, the common view that the primary role of designers is to solve local problems for concrete clients is already becoming less influential. For example, Sanders and Stappers (2012) re-describe designers as user-centred creators informed by ethnographic research. However, ergonomic and human-centred forms of design that seek to focus on ‘users’ can also lead to the negative effect of defuturing (a depletion of future options and shortening of the future life), for example when they are employed as agents of consumerism (Fry, 2008, p. 53, 54). As will be discussed below, who or what can be counted as a user is open to questioning; along with what might constitute legitimate, desirable or sustainable ‘use.’ In the context of ecological relationships, the very concept of ‘use’ appears to be suggestive of outdated, exploitative attitudes towards the environment.To move beyond understandings that are confined by such instrumentalist interpretations or by existing political and economic paradigms, designing needs to be reconsidered, for example, as an elemental, ontological practice (cf. “ontological design,” (Willis, 2007), behaviour-steering technology (Jelsma, 2000), transformation design (Burns et al., 2006) or persuasive technology (captology) (Fogg, 2003)). What are the key concepts relevant to an ontological practice that aims to imagine crossspecies habitats? For example, are characteristics typically applied to ecosystems, such as biodiversity, useful in this regard? As it is evident from recent overviews (Garson et al., 2017), concepts such as this are still in active negotiation. Multiple definitions of biodiversity coexist. There are parallel applications of this concept across scales such as genes, organisms, species or ecosystems. Its pragmatic effects on conservation are often driven by human preferences for valuing some charismatic forms of life, such as elephants, more than others, such as microbes, or viruses, or genetically modified organisms. To provide an alternative example, some of the more recent approaches understand rewilding as a measure of human-independent autonomy that can be sustained by the artificially composed ecological systems that might be

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appropriate, for example, for the increasingly abandoned agricultural land (Cordell et al.,2005; Corlett, 2016). These concepts seem to suggest that the ideal replacement tree should be ephemeral: temporarily present, dissemblable/decomposable or, even if it is harder to imagine: autonomously mobile, energy independent and self-repairing. Diversity is commonly used as a generic characteristic or ‘natural way’ but resolving it into a set of design principles is far from straightforward. Nature is typically admired in contemporary design circles because it “produces maximum effect with minimum means” (Kolarevic and Klinger, 2008, p. 10). Yet, the idea that ecologies are finely balanced or wasteless is “bad poetic science” (Dawkins, 1998). As a category, ‘waste’ is of course a human invention and an expression of human values. Still, if some can see nature as wasteless, others may point out that nature is wasteful in many ways. For example, it is wasteful of energy as only a small portion of incoming solar radiation is used by life and living organisms dissipate energy constantly; nature is wasteful of individual lives, with survivors often only making it by chance; and nature is wasteful of innovation because local discoveries are eliminated by natural selection in the periods when the environment does not change significantly and in the process, most of the innovations are lost. In these conditions, how should diversity be valued? As a unique, as-found, snapshot of long and unique historical accumulation? This attitude presumes that the historical processes that led to the current state can be arrested, which does not appear to be the case. If diversity is to be valued as an effect of the underlying processes (e.g., selection, drift, speciation and dispersal at the level of community ecology (Vellend, 2010)) it needs to be accepted that it comes coupled with other phenomena such as blind opportunism or indifference to human concerns. In this context, what happens to recognisable human criteria and values such as comfort, safety, reliability or efficiency? In a field with other actors and values, what new guidelines and criteria are needed or even possible? How can foundational concepts be utilised to generate the practical criteria for design? For example, is biodiversity measurable? Can these measurements be standardised and made simple enough to operate in the context of a design project? Existing strategies for habitat restoration recommend that each project should start with an establishment of a goal state. The desired characteristics for such a habitat are often a compromise between the states of indigenous landscapes and other interests, such as agriculture. However, most landscapes have been affected by human actions for thousands of years. Many living forms depend on environments affected by humans and some might have evolved within them.This interdependence is especially prescient in the contemporary conditions where most living organisms, at least on land, have to live among artificial structures such as roads, dams, buildings and so on (Cronon, 1996 [1995]; Low, 2017 [2002]; McKibben, 2003 [1989]; Wapner, 2010). If the return to the pre-human state is impossible or not desirable, what are the suitable criteria for alternative goal states? In the case of artificial replacements for old large trees, the resulting landscape can be directed to very distinct visions. In principle, one can aim to actively maintain a model of “wilderness” that conforms to the biodiversity found in historical records or in less disturbed pockets of bush. However, in many cases this is no longer possible, for example in the cases of commercial forests intended for harvesting or in fragmented landscapes. In spite of this, the idea of artificial replacements for trees is met by intuitive repulsion and scepticism by many unprepared people. For them, a confirmation that such trees are only intended as a temporary prop that supports animal life until the natural trees are large enough is a necessary (but

Notes on more-than-human architecture  29

not necessarily sufficient) justification. However, in many environments, the large trees are not coming back. In addition, even in the environments where they might return, introduction of artificial structures specifically designed to provide ‘modern conveniences’ to animals might result in new preferences and dependencies that will make a return to natural trees difficult or impossible. Dependencies on anthropogenic environments are now common for many species, including those listed as endangered. Examples include barn swallows, sparrows, urban foxes and many other animals that prefer habitats modified by humans to wilder places even if these environments have not been constructed with these animals’ needs in mind (Low, 2017 [2002]). Thus, introduction of artificial replacements, especially at scale, can shift an existing environment to a substantially altered state and potentially result in a cascade of hard-to-predict effects. A design impulse towards ‘nature’ might lead to another form of complex artifice.

Design participants Acceptance of the responsibility for anthropocentrism’s pervasive environmental impacts can arrive through the understanding of how the concept of human was invented. The relevant discourse on post-humanism, and its objective of “going beyond humanism’s limit(ations)” (Fry, 2011, p. 245), is well established and design practices can benefit from rethinking their objectives and methods to take this into account. One way to approach this rethinking is though studies of the roles technology plays in human performance and the suggestion here is that such studies can productively move from the invention and appraisal of tools to the analysis of humans enmeshed in technological ecologies. To illustrate, such analyses can vary from in-depth observations of how meaning emerges in low-level material interactions (Jahn et al., 2014), to utilisation of ‘living’ models, as discussed in a precursor to this article (Roudavski and Jahn, 2016), to broad considerations now attempted in ‘software studies’ (e.g., Bratton, 2015). Another way to shift the attention from the stereotypically understood human stakeholders is through the deliberate inclusion of more-than-human entities. However, the rationale for such inclusion and the procedures through which participation can be undertaken are far from settled. Identity and agency of such participants cannot be taken for granted and modes of communication with such entities are far from obvious. The processes of negotiation that can account for diverging tendencies of human and other stakeholders are not yet available and call for substantial further work in philosophy, politics and ethics as well as in design. What can be counted as an actor is open to interpretation leading to frameworks discussed as ‘flat’ or ‘weak’ ontologies. In the context of design, who or what are the legitimate or simply meaningful ‘clients’? Should client representation resolve itself at the level of genes, organisms, superorganisms, species, biomes or other possible structures? Should such clients be living, semi-living or defined in some other manner? To illustrate, traditionally, architects and biologists considered structures as objects and functions as processes. The increasingly influential alternative view (Odling-Smee and Turner, 2011) regards living structures as processes. For example, habitats created or modified by animals can be seen as constructed ecological niches (Odling-Smee et al., 2003) or physiological extensions of animals’ organisms (Turner, 2000). Consequently, human architecture can also be seen as living (Turner and Soar, 2008). In a contrasting move, human beings can be seen not as primarily biological entities but as actors that are designed and constructed through the cultural use of technology (Fry, 2012). In the

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time when rivers can obtain legal personhood and the requisite rights (Hutchison, 2014): who are the makers? Who sits in judgement? Who stands to benefit? When understanding a template habitat structure, such as an old large tree, that a newly designed artificial object is to replicate, what characteristics are important? Height, girth, crown spread, trunk and branch volume, canopy structure, canopy volume, and overall tree shape can be considered, as is typical when measuring large trees for record books. These can be complemented with the information on the functional affordances such as numbers and types of nesting and perching sites as well as the information on the typical inhabitants such as birds, invertebrates or fungi. Who (how and when) can collect or provide such information? Comprehensive information is not available and the amount of information to describe a habitat such as an old large tree can be overwhelming. Existing information tends to come from sources that have compiled the records for specific goals, for specific groups of organisms, specific geographic locations and via a variety of methods that produce hard-to-merge datasets.Theoretical biologists might study how formal fractal systems can describe botanical structures, preservation societies are interested in listing all old trees and finding record-holding champions, ecologists might evaluate reliance of one threatened species on the density of suitable hollows. Established architectural types and typical architectural procurement and vetting methods need to be extended so that this disparate knowledge can more readily inform architectural design and be translated into concrete proposals for action. In the case of artificial replacements for large old trees, the argument for the preservation of biodiversity is generated by the ecology experts. Governments might be supporting similar goals, for example through biodiversity offsets, a scheme that seeks to compensate for habitat losses caused by economic development, such as new construction or wood harvesting. Advocates for biodiversity argue that the “aim to protect the ecological values of existing and future urban areas, as well as adjoining habitat such as peri-urban nature reserves, should be articulated during the planning phase and carried through the full development process.” (Ikin et al., 2015, p. 207) However, where ecosystems have been already radically altered, where the balance is severely skewed or where some of the ecosystem members are unwanted by humans, framing the problem as preservation might be misleading and the actual challenge is the establishment of some novel state. To differing degrees, this problem is typical, given that no ecosystem on the planet can now be classed as unaffected by human activities. Thus, even if a commitment to “ecological values” is achieved at the planning stage, the problem of design remains, as is evidenced by the diversity of possible designs occurring within the confines of comparatively more mature architectural or urban-planning guidelines. Furthermore, innovative design often helps to determine what is possible and desirable in planning. Thus, innovation, across all aspects of design including stakeholder inclusion, processes and outcomes is needed even if the overall goal is to be modest. The challenge of designing artificial habitats such as synthetic replacements for large old trees can be very controversial, especially if the resulting structures are large and numerous. Therefore, the appropriate design approach will have to focus on the challenges of building visions of the future supported by persuasive narratives as well as on the generation of engineering solutions. The appropriate practices fall under the rubric of participatory design. However, the human imagination and innovation alone will not suffice when the benefits are to be shared by all life and this challenge takes form of expanding contemporary understandings of participatory design to become more radically inclusive, from the design for nonhumans to the design with them.

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Design methods “It is difficult, either for an individual or a society, to plunge full speed ahead into the future while braking to keep pace with a biological past.” (Gunter, 1985, p. 107) Indeed, the recognition that practical design necessarily participates in ontological-design processes invites an abandonment of the concept of creativity understood as an agency directed from within a human creator and out into the world. At the moment, even the inclusive interpretations that make an effort to emphasise the distributed character of creativity and acknowledge the everpresent involvement of heterogeneous agents, including nonhumans, focus on modifications introduced into the environment rather than on the inevitable simultaneous destruction of prior conditions.Yet, this necessary characteristic of creativity is important in a world where impossible-to-replace and emergent conditions, such as cultural or biological diversities, are being diminished with increasing speed and replaced with intentional human creations. In response to this conceptual omission, this chapter suggests a shift from the notion of creativity as the process of addition to its interpretation as the process of restructuring, or – in other words – a shift from creativity as an ingenious human ‘making’ to more modest metaphors that emphasise continuity of the world’s processes, such as metamorphosis, or evolution. This alternative way of seeing can adjust the orientation of design practice by exposing the need for methods that have the ability to transform whole networks of habits and routines (Bourdieu, 1990). In the available world, all making is necessarily prefigured by the already-existing context that one can choose to emphasise as nature, modified nature, artificial entities experienced as natural or artificial entities that are unmistakably artificial. A complete understanding of this complex mix is not yet available. Given the constant change and the inherent unpredictability of the multifaceted systems at play, such an understanding is also impossible. This realisation, then, suggests a deliberate position of what Sadar calls “age-old virtues: humility, modesty and accountability” (Sardar, 2010, p. 442). The current societal and environmental conditions have been described as a transition into post-normal times where established systems are coming under pressure (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1993; Montuori, 2011; Sardar, 2010). This uncertainty is further amplified for designers whose specialisation is to do with inherently wicked problems where the resources are incomplete but the decisions are expected. These designers are unavoidably constrained by the human mind’s excessive love for meaningfulness and certainty (Burton, 2008) making generation and the acceptance of adequate proposals more difficult. In these conditions, a deliberately modest attitude frames research as a necessary and permanent part of design intended to reduce ignorance rather than to produce knowledge (Wagner, 1993) and resulting in the “ignorance-based worldview” (Vitek and Jackson, 2008), that emphasises the limits to human knowledge and human control while cautioning against short-term action, as the foundation for design. Such a worldview can foreground the understanding of design as activities of redirection rather than an inherently creative or innovative endeavour. Amid such activities, designers assume the role of mediators responsible for exchanges between multiple stakeholders, human and nonhuman, natural and artificial, living and non-living. This shift in attitude can be characterised as a turn towards opportunism: from pre-planning to ambiguity where decisions are made in the process of making, in the context of actual sites and in response to available information; from central control to local diversity where decisions are responsive to changing contexts; and from performance thresholds to adaptability

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where decisions are made in response to incoming information about the environment and the effects of past actions. To enable such a turn, architectural design and construction workflows need means to observe the dynamic behaviours of host systems, understand relationships within these systems and trigger on-demand, local actions. The focus on modesty and the acceptance of imperfection are the basic premises of conservatism. Yet, conservatism, that is also about preferring familiar to the unfamiliar, is a direction without the tools to answer the key question: how can one behave modestly in postnormal times where radical change is inevitable and the familiar is unsustainable? What types of structures might be used to produce artificial habitats? Depending on what is selected as important design criteria, the results might look very different. For example, artificial reefs are often made from scuttled ships, tyres or even old tanks and airplanes.While this approach might be functionally adequate, from a standpoint of an architectural designer it looks like a missed opportunity, potentially leading to culturally unsustainable structures, even if under water, but especially on land. Existing resistance to the erection of such constructions as wind turbines demonstrates what might happen. The space of possible structures remains largely unexplored. Artificial trees might attempt to resemble their biological prototypes as closely as possible or appear very different from them while providing some of the desired affordances. As in many situations, it is likely that artificially constructed habitats can be made more economical, impactful and culturally acceptable if biomimicry approaches are combined with technological innovations. This challenge stands out as an opportunity for design disciplines with their emphasis on open-ended practical experimentation, their awareness of the wide spectrum of possibilities, for example in regard to geometric and structural arrangements, and their proficiency in working with disparate datasets, stakeholders and values. Connected with the above, the design and making processes that lead to the construction of artificial habitat structures such as large old trees can be based on human imagination or generate unusual structures semi-automatically, in response to criteria and constraints. Datadriven, performance-oriented, algorithmic and computational approaches are interesting in this regard because they have the capacity to distance human designers from design outcomes providing a conceptual space for splicing in other creative influences. A nonhuman stakeholder such as a bird or a marsupial cannot be asked directly about their habitat preferences, at least not in English (or in, say, Woiwurrung). The challenge of including their voices into the design process requires innovative approaches based on observational data. How can such structures be built, used and decommissioned? Artificial replacements for real trees might be useful because they are quick to construct. This is their main, but not only, potential advantage over naturally grown trees. However, as a result, they cannot grow and decompose in the same way that natural structures do and thus require considered strategies for production, assembly, modification, disassembly, reuse and recycling. The establishment of guidelines for longevity, location and prominence of artificial structures existing as prosthetic but functional members of ecosystems, as well as cultural artefacts, is a separate challenge with unobvious criteria for success or risk management. What is the feasibility of artificial habitat replacements? How should the value and risk of such projects be established? Should artificial habitat structures be valued, perhaps even costed, in comparison to the natural structures they replace or for the ecosystem services they can provide? Can (and should) such projects be undertaken at scale and with what additional implications?

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How can generative design approaches affect public reception of artificial habitats? Can the public be better persuaded when the information on the existing trees, their appearances and their affordances are compared with the information on artificial habitat structures and effectively narrated? For example, the public can be given an opportunity to observe and follow the self-design and recovery processes instigated or assisted by synthetic structures. With contemporary interactive technologies, this participation can be local or remote, real-time or asynchronous, as desired. This information can be framed as stories about specific characters, or games, or provided as some form of ambient information that links typical human habitats with the dwellings of other animals. In the context where the strategies are unusual and the outcomes are not necessarily evident or intuitive, the design of engagement strategies in parallel with the design of a material intervention is necessary for the attainment of a lasting cross-species partnership. Admission of nonhuman clients and partners has the potential to further reinforce the quantitative turn in design and planning. This turn has been predicated by the increasingly widespread commitment to sustainability, wellbeing and other performance targets that prescribe technical and financial audits, energy models, performance codes and rating systems. These measures aim to outmode unsustainable architecture and promote best practice but, given the broad reach of national and international auditing schemes, can have a standardising effect on design. With the focus on statistical data describing behaviour and preferences of ecosystem participants, such standardising effects can be further amplified. On the other hand, the recognition of the local, spontaneous and non-repeatable character of ecosystems can help to reinforce the unique features of habitats, especially with the help of on-demand, contextspecific data collection and deliberate reliance on alternative sources of creativity such as the capability of ecosystems for self-design or the idea of partnering with nature (Odum, 2007; Van der Ryn and Cowan, 2007 [1996]).

Conclusion “[H]ow can designers join things together again if they continue to be educated, and employed, as profit-enhancing specialists, rather than ecologically and socially-minded generalists?” asks Wood (2008, p. 2) His own answer is that “[d]esigners . . . need to cocreate a discourse that enables everyone to understand things in a more holistic and relational way.” (Wood, 2007) A variety of parallel approaches already exists, including, for example, design activism (FuadLuke, 2009) and metadesign (Giaccardi and Fischer, 2008; Wood, 2008). Redirective practices of this type aim to reshape what a designing subject is, knows and does. Such practices seek to modify how people think about familiar or future phenomena. Given the problematic (unsustainable) nature of many established approaches, redirective efforts need to challenge the very basic assumptions. As argued by Fischer (Fischer, 2003, p. 89),“[u]ser-centered and participatory design approaches have focused primarily on activities taking place at design time,” neglecting to support “systems as living entities that can evolve over time.” In response, his interpretation of “metadesign” is as “a unique design approach concerned with opening up solution spaces rather than complete solutions (hence the prefix meta-), and aimed at creating social and technical infrastructures in which new forms of collaborative design can take place.” This conceptualisation, while arriving from the field of software engineering, with different types of users and problems, is a suggestive approach with which to tackle the challenge

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of rethinking design as congregations of complexly interrelated ongoing performances of dynamic systems, or ecologies. Complete and instantaneous solutions are impossible in such situations, especially when the challenge is that of redesigning the design practices and the designers themselves. Instead, methods of change should be gradual: accumulating expertise; constructing demonstrators; building evidence; developing workflows; establishing concepts, building communities and sharing knowledge. On the other hand, in interactions with complex natural systems, especially those that have experienced severe modification, passive and gradual approaches might be insufficient. Often, it is necessary to conduct an invasive experiment to solicit a response that can be informative for future design. Radical imagination is also vital in times of radical change and it is important to see how the limitations of human creativity can be simultaneously overcome and the power of this creativity amplified through broadly inclusive partnerships with nonhuman stakeholders. In resistance to unification driven by quantitative methods and common models, it is important to defend diverse design approaches even if this is inefficient because all human knowledge is destined to remain incomplete and all human models are simplifications, especially in the case of complex and inherently nondeterministic systems. By analogy with cultural diversity and biodiversity, the investment into the redundancy of envisioned futures will contribute to the robustness of the system, with multiple approaches tried in parallel, with possibilities for local adaptation supported by additional degrees of freedom and with opportunities for the expression of context-specific creativity intentionally preserved. * * * In discussing the possible approaches to the rethinking of design, this chapter has employed an example that considered questions arising from the proposal to design artificial habitats to replace large old trees. Unusual but characteristic of future challenges, this example highlighted the need for further theoretical and practical work on design values, design participation and possible design methods. The core tenets of the conceptual approaches outlined above can lead to a broad impact only through systematic deployment at multiple sites of practice. The emerging notions and techniques need to be actively integrated into the institutional education, manifest themselves via best-practice guidelines and be emphasised in disseminated project work. The positive outcomes of such integration will take form of improved design methods, supported across domains of knowledge, founded on shared conceptual frameworks and delivered to all, on demand. For example, the project that aims to propose artificial replacements for large old trees can be made more informed, more accountable and more influential if it is tackled as open-source and open-access speculative research that aims to produce specific solutions, but also share tools for independent analysis, provide information to support external criticism and prepare practical kits of techniques that can be customised and redeployed elsewhere.

Acknowledgements Ideas in this article have been developed in with Gwyllim Jahn and their discussion in application to technical systems can be seen in a collaborative journal article (Roudavski and Jahn, 2016). This work has been supported by the Australian Research Council's Discovery Grant DP170104010, Place and Parametricism: Provocations for the Rethinking of Design.

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References Baine, Mark (2001). ‘Artificial Reefs: A Review of Their Design, Application, Management and Performance’, Ocean and Coastal Management, 44, 3/4, pp. 241–259 Bourdieu, Pierre (1990). The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press) Bratton, Benjamin H. (2015). The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) Browne, Mark A. and M. Gee Chapman (2011). ‘Ecologically Informed Engineering Reduces Loss of Intertidal Biodiversity on Artificial Shorelines’, Environmental Science & Technology, 45, 19, pp. 8204–8207 Bulleri, Fabio and M. Gee Chapman (2015). ‘Artificial Physical Structures’, in Marine Ecosystems: Human Impacts on Biodiversity, Functioning and Services, ed. by Christopher L. J. Frid and Tasman P. Crowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 167–201 Burns, Colin, Hilary Cottam, Chris Vanstone, and Jennie Winhall (2006). RED Paper 02: Transformation Design (London: Design Council) Burton, Robert Alan (2008). On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not (New York: St. Martin’s Press) Cantrell, Bradley, Laura J. Martin, and Erle C. Ellis (2017). ‘Designing Autonomy: Opportunities for New Wildness in the Anthropocene’, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 32, 3, pp. 156–166 Cordell, Ken H., John C. Bergstrom, and James M. Bowker, eds (2005). The Multiple Values of Wilderness (State College, PA:Venture Publishing) Corlett, Richard T. (2016). ‘Restoration, Reintroduction, and Rewilding in a Changing World’, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 31, 6, pp. 453–462 Cronon, William (1996 [1995]). ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. by William Cronon, paperback edn (New York W. W. Norton), pp. 69–90 Dawkins, Richard (1998). Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (London: Allen Lane) Fischer, Gerhard (2003). ‘Meta-Design: Beyond User-Centered and Participatory Design’, in Proceedings of HCI International: Human-Computer Interaction: Theory and Practice, ed. by Julie A. Jacko and Constantine Stephanidis, (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), pp. 88–92 Fogg, Brian J. (2003). Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do (Amsterdam; Boston: Morgan-Kaufmann) Fry, Tony (2008). Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice (Oxford: Berg) Fry, Tony (2011). Design as Politics (Oxford: Berg) Fry, Tony (2012). Becoming Human by Design (London: Berg) Fuad-Luke, Alastair (2009). Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World (London; Sterling, VA: Earthscan) Funtowicz, Silvio O., and Jerome R. Ravetz (1993). ‘Science for the Post-Normal Age’, Futures, 25, 7, pp. 739–755 Garson, Justin, Anya Plutynski, and Sahotra Sarkar, eds (2017). The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Biodiversity (London, GB: Routledge) Giaccardi, Elisa and Gerhard Fischer (2008). ‘Creativity and Evolution: A Metadesign Perspective’, Digital Creativity Digital Creativity, 19, 1, pp. 19–32 Gibbons, Philip and David Lindenmayer (2002). Tree Hollows and Wildlife Conservation in Australia (Collingwood: CSIRO) Gunter, Pete A.Y. (1985).‘Creativity and Ecology’, in Creativity in Art, Religion and Culture, ed. by Michael H. Mitias (Amsterdam: Rodopi), pp. 107–116 Hallé, Francis., Roelof A. A. Oldeman, and Philip B.Tomlinson (1978). Tropical Trees and Forests: An Architectural Analysis (Berlin: Springer) Hutchison, Abigail (2014). ‘The Whanganui River as a Legal Person’, Alternative Law Journal, 39, 3, pp. 179–182 Ikin, Karen, et al. (2015). ‘Key Lessons for Achieving Biodiversity-Sensitive Cities and Towns’, Ecological Management & Restoration, 16, 3, pp. 206–214

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Vellend, Mark (2010). ‘Conceptual Synthesis in Community Ecology’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 85, 2, pp. 183–206 Vitek, William, and Wes Jackson (2008). ‘The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge’, ed. by Bill Vitek and Jackson, Wes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky) Wagner, Jon (1993). ‘Ignorance in Educational Research: Or, How Can You “Not” Know That?’, Educational Researcher, 22, 5, pp. 15–23 Wapner, Paul Kevin (2010). Living Through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) Willis, Anne-Marie (2007). ‘Ontological Design – Laying the Ground’, in Design Philosophy Papers Collection Three, ed. by Anne-Marie Willis (Ravensbourne: Team D/E/S Publications), pp. 80–98 Wood, John (2007). Design for Micro-Utopias: Making the Unthinkable Possible (Aldershot: Gower) Wood, John (2008). ‘Changing the Change: A Fractal Framework for Metadesign’, in Changing the Change: Design, Visions, Proposals and Tools, ed. by Carla Cipolla and Pier Paolo Peruccio (Turin: Allemandi), pp. 1–8

3 THE UN-DESIGNABILITY OF THE VIRTUAL Design from problem-solving to problem-finding Betti Marenko

For the new – in other words, difference – calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other model, from an unrecognised and unrecognisable terra incognita. – Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 1994, p. 136

Introduction This chapter offers a speculative proposal for a new theoretical framework in design research underpinned by two key ideas: morphogenesis and the virtual. Morphogenesis describes a process of form generation through growth, differentiation and continuous variation whereby new forms emerge from the unpredictable interplay of dynamic forces and the relentless movement of matter. In the context of this chapter the notion of morphogenesis encompasses not only the emergence of form through the unfolding of matter, but also those generative processes – be them systemic (organizations, collectives, structures), conceptual (ideas, beliefs, cultures) or behavioural (experiences, practices, enactments) – which possess similar morphogenetic capacities. In a morphogenetic perspective, then, systems, thoughts and practices emerge – like form does – from the interplay of continuity, variability and contingency, rather than being imposed by an ideal blueprint. I draw on Gilles Deleuze’s ideas around the virtual (Deleuze, 1991) to investigate these morphogenetic processes in all their variability. In the context of the present chapter, the virtual is taken as what problematizes the possible by inserting contingency in the process of the emergence of the new. Thus, a tension exists between the virtual as what is uniquely placed to engender true innovation, and its aleatory and unforeseeable nature – akin to the tension existing in design between form-making, on one side, and the need to acknowledge, and work with, the contingent, on the other. On these grounds, a new framework for design research is proposed: a shift from problem-solving to problem-finding. This is underpinned by the idea of the undesigned at the core of design itself, and explored through a morphogenetic model. Beginning with material morphogenesis, the chapter asks: If matter is constructed in dynamic terms, as a flow whose self-organizing properties are emergent rather than given,

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immanent rather than static, how might this inform a new way of thinking about the design process and the designer’s role? What are the implications for design if matter is liberated from the impositions of hylomorphism? The chapter then broadens the scope of these questions by considering the effects of an expanded morphogenetic model in relation to design as a whole. An initial response comes from looking at Deleuze’s ideas on the virtual and its actualization, which, I argue, should to be taken on board by design to inform a problematizing paradigm with which to rethink the conditions of the emergence of the new. If the actualization of the virtual is to be understood not in terms of things, but in terms of events; as something ultimately unexpected, strange and unforeseeable; as something with the power to unlock a different future by provoking change and engendering transformation, then it seems clear to me that design is bound up with a similar set of concerns. How is the new being produced? How to catalyse the unexpected, unforeseeable differential of the event that, alone, has the force to create change and produce innovation? How to capture stories from the future so that they give tangibility to a present in the making? To clarify what is meant by the term ‘design’ in the context of this chapter: I contend that design is never a thing, but a process. A process of speculation, invention and change, which always produces tangible implications that affect behaviours and lives. Such a notion of design as the process of changing what is into what can be, always engaged with the not-yet, strongly resonates with Deleuze’s assertion that philosophy is a creative practice precisely because it is always engaged with the creation of the new (Deleuze, 1995). One of the key tasks of philosophy, for Deleuze, is precisely to figure out under which conditions the new is created (Deleuze, 1995). The production of the new is bound up with a creative evolution and cannot be conceived outside a duration. This means that the new is not something transcendent, a mysterious founding break, or a drastic interruption of the known. Rather, it is something completely immanent happening in time. The production of the new, then, always concerns the virtual. This is also why we cannot talk about design without, in some way or another, engaging with the virtual. After all, the virtual is always process and production, rather than a product; a container of manifold tendencies and propensities that can be actualized, rather than a fixed sequence with a teleologically predetermined goal; an urgent, insistent, unpredictable force that inserts itself into (and breaks apart) the tangibility of concrete reality. To look at design through the lens of Deleuze’s virtual is, therefore, relevant, timely and charged with possibilities for design. However, a word of warning is necessary. To think design with Deleuze does not mean extracting ideas from an established philosophical corpus and then applying them to design.1 The point is not a philosophy ‘applied’ to design or, worse, a philosophy wanting to monitor design’s output. Rather, in line with Deleuze’s practical philosophy (Deleuze, 1988) this is about a processual, in-fieri way of proceeding (albeit not a method), a way of redesigning the relationship between thinking and making through a non-linear, emergent, open perspective. An applied philosophy, on the other hand, could not be more distant from Deleuze’s philosophical empiricism, which he describes as “analyzing states of things so as to bring out previously nonexistent concepts from them” (Deleuze, 2006, p. 304).2 Such an act of sheer, wild creation is what empiricism is about: “the most insane creation of concepts ever seen or heard” (Deleuze, 1994, p. XX). In a radical reversal of canonical philosophy, what comes first for the empiricist is an existent state of things out of which new concepts (and new practices) are to be extracted. As far as this chapter is concerned, then, such a state of things out of which new concepts and new practices are to be extracted is given by design’s own process-oriented

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nature; and what is to be mined from it as a “previously nonexistent concept” is the notion of the undesigned: the amorphous and problematizing complicity of vagueness and contingency to be found at the core of design. The chapter begins by looking at architecture theorist Sanford Kwinter’s work on morphogenesis, in particular his take on matter’s capacity for self-generation and the model it affords to describe the emergence of the new. Then, it goes on to draw on Deleuze’s book Bergsonism (1991) to emphasize how the virtual and its actualization, and the distinction between the virtual and the possible, should be taken as key theoretical resources for design research. Finally, Deleuze’s discussion of the notion of the problem serves to illuminate a new way of thinking about design through a model that, by reframing design’s boundaries as a subject discipline, proposes a shift from design as a problem-solving to design as a problemfinding event.

Matter, morphogenesis and design Drawing on the twentieth century’s panoply of paradigm shifts that have taken place in the sciences, Kwinter (2007) remarks how matter’s capacity to self-organize spontaneously must be taken into account by those who design and create physical artefacts. While this observation is not in itself particularly original, Kwinter’s notable insights consist in stretching the idea of emergence and evolution of form – morphogenesis – to every aspect of the world, well beyond architectural form generation. In this perspective, morphogenesis concerns not only tangible forms but the capacity of systems, thoughts and practices to organize spontaneously, and to be self-generative too. A great deal of Kwinter’s work (1998, 2002, 2007) reiterates these issues by focusing on self-organizing systems and the creation of form capable of evolving and changing through space and over time. In the essay “Landscapes of Change: Boccioni’s “Stati d’animo” as a General Theory of Models” (1992), Kwinter examines different models of the possible and the extent to which they are able to embody and capture the real. Classical hylomorphism, for instance, explains the genesis of form through the linear imposition of a blueprint onto passive matter. This model is however limited in its scope and applications insofar as it allows only a number of possibilities to be reproduced. Put differently, hylomorphism does not allow novelty to manifest itself, nor does it afford genuine space for the new to emerge. Rather, in this model “the state of a system at a given moment can be expressed in the very same terms (number and relation of parameters) as any of its earlier or later states” (Kwinter, 1992, p. 53). In other words, while this model can explain how a body moving through the system incurs change, it cannot however account for the change occurring to the system as such.Thus, the only variations hylomorphism is able to capture are those expressed by perpetual self-identity – when a body changes only in degrees (quantity), but not in kind (quality). Deleuze explains the limits of hylomorphism by saying that the couple matter-form cannot account for determination, as it is “completely internal to representation” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 275). For this reason, the changes occurring within the hylomorphic model cannot produce genuine innovation as they lack the capacity to engender the emergence and variety of form. The opposite proposition to the hylomorphic model would be to say that matter is endowed with morphogenetic capacities of its own, and is able to self-organize, self-generate, and change as an effect of its continuous folding and unfolding. New forms emerge from the interplay of forces. Thus, there are forms because there are processes. No longer is there an

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ideal form imposed by an external agency, or an ideal design blueprint. Rather, form emerges from virtualities being ceaselessly actualized. This is how the new is created and the not-yet comes to be. Furthermore, for Deleuze and Guattari (1988) matter is alive with the potential of its endless evolution, and everything is formed through differentiation and individuation of the same substance.3 The categorical difference between matter and form is bypassed. What is celebrated instead is “the prodigious idea of Nonorganic Life” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, p. 411) where “the essential thing is no longer forms and matter, but forces, densities, intensities” (ibid, p. 343). This view of matter as inherently spontaneous and capable of selforganization has been promptly taken on board by architecture theory (Leach, 2009)4 and, more recently, by design theory (Marenko, 2015a, 2015b). Indeed, materialist philosophies have a great deal to offer design: a way to think about matter not as something passive and inert that obediently follows an external imposition – be it the Law, or the Royal science, or a design blueprint – but as an active raw matter-energy – movement that generates all that surrounds us through self-initiated emergent processes. It is this flow of matter, rather then the structures created, to constitute our immediate reality (DeLanda, 1999). Our present (and future) reality is pure difference that emerges via matter flowing through time. Thus, the potential for change and for the emergence of the new is lodged in this relentless unfolding of explosive matter.5 Philosopher Manuel DeLanda (1992, 1999, 2002, 2004, 2009) and architect Lars Spuybroek (2008) have both championed this brand of radical and vitalist materialism from the two different standpoints of philosophy and architecture. Both DeLanda and Spuybroek articulate in their work the philosophical and practical implications of focusing not only on matter’s properties, but on its capacities – capacities for continuous variation. This distinction between capacities and properties is important. While properties are quantifiable and measurable, capacities express instead what matter can do, its overall power to affect and be affected, in other words its entire pathosphere. It is clearly on capacities rather than properties that morphogenesis and material variability depend (DeLanda, 2009). Therefore, what are the implications of this morphogenetic perspective for design? Can design rely more on what has been called material information6 (Leach, 2009) as its generative driver, and not as an afterthought to consider after the design phase has happened? Material information concerns precisely a way of engaging not simply with the properties, but with the capacities of matter as the actual drivers of the design process. It also means to bypass the idea of inert matter endlessly malleable, and shift instead from form to formation, or else, from form-making to form-finding (Leach, 2009). This perspective has important consequences for design. First, it prompts design to question its relationship with materiality, specifically some of its assumptions about how objects come to exist. By grasping matter through the morphogenetic model – where matter is never static but coalesces in a continuity of different stages – design can theorize the production of the new not as the by-product of an external agency, but as the outcome of a process where continuity, variability and contingency are interwoven. By rethinking matter in terms of events and processes, rather than in terms of things and objects, design can shift its focus from the teleological fixation with the final outcome, and with a customary concern for the user, to how to acknowledge, map and harness the virtualities that constitute design’s own manifold domain. It is useful at this point to draw on Deleuze’s shift from moulding to modulation (1993) that allows for the interplay of materialities and temporalities to swing back at the centre of the process of creation of the new (Marenko, 2015a). This allows us to see the design process through the specific lens given by the process of actualization of the virtual.

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Before discussing this in more detail, it is also worth noting another crucial effect of the morphogenetic perspective: it compels design to downplay and rethink the traditional role of the designer as the overarching and overseeing star. Philosopher Brain Massumi, who has written widely on the intersection between the virtual and architecture, remarks how New form is not conceived. It is coaxed out, flushed from its virtuality. The architect’s job is in a sense catalytic, no longer orchestrating. He or she is more a chemist (or perhaps alchemist) staging catalytic reactions in an abstract matter of variation, than a maestro pulling fully formed rabbits of genius from thin air with a masterful wave of the drafting pencil. (Massumi, 1998, p. 18) What becomes privileged instead is the abstract regimes of forces that deploy the new, manifest in the design process. Put differently, any design process, whether it goes on to produce an object, a building, a city, an artefact, a service, or an experience, is nothing but a distribution of forces and intensities traversing, and temporarily solidifying into, matter. It is this process – which is, as we will see below, the actualization of the virtual – that affords the capture of the new. Insisting on morphogenesis is therefore an entry point in deploying Deleuze’ virtual to rethink design as a process. Let us now turn to Deleuze’s thoughts on the real, the actual and the virtual so to illuminate further the role his ideas can play for design research.

Deleuze: realization and actualization Deleuze distinguishes between the process by which the possible becomes real (realization) and the process by which the virtual becomes actual (actualization). The possible is a mode of anticipatory resemblance and doubling up of the real, a sort of pre-planned, pre-formed version of what exists already. Precisely because it does not involve anything unexpected, the process of realization is always predictable. On the other hand, the transition from the virtual to the actual (actualization) is a process rooted in, and generating, genuine innovation. On this point, it is worth quoting Deleuze at length: Now the process of realization is subject to two essential rules, one of resemblance and another of limitation. For the real is supposed to be in the image of the possible that it realizes. . . . And, every possible is not realized, realization involves a limitation by which some possible are supposed to be repulsed or thwarted while other “pass” into the real. The virtual, on the other hand, does not have to be realized, but rather actualized; and the rules of actualization are not those of resemblance and limitation, but those of difference or divergence and of creation. (Deleuze, 1991, p. 96) In the first case only a limited number of possibilities are reproduced and there is no space for novelty to manifest itself – an apt description of the hylomorphic model. In the second case, we have a model where the unfolding of matter and the unpredictable interaction of forces at play allows the emergence of new forms, of the not-yet – that is, morphogenesis.

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If the real is what already exists here and now, and the possible is what can exist, it follows that the possible is determined by, and ultimately dependent upon, the real. In other words, it is by knowing what is real that we can predict the probability that it might turn, one day, into the possible.Thus, we can predict which possibilities will be realized in the future starting from the reality we know already. However, until we stay in the realm of the possible we only have access to a sort of mechanical evolution that adds existence to what is already known and already exists. Consequently, there is not much space for the unknown and the radically new to manifest themselves. This is why, for Deleuze, the possible is a “false notion, the source of false problems” (Deleuze, 1991, p. 98). In what sounds like a veritable warning against overplanning and retrofitting by design, he continues: We give ourselves a real that is ready-made, preformed, pre-existent to itself, and that will pass into existence according to an order of successive limitations. Everything is already completely given: all of the real in the image, in the pseudo-actuality of the possible. Then the sleight of hand (emphasis added) becomes obvious: if the real is said to resemble the possible, is this not in fact because the real was expected to come about by its own means, to “project backward” (emphasis added), a fictitious image of it, and to claim that it was possible at any time, before it happened? In fact, it is not the real that resembles the possible, it is the possible that resembles the real, because it has been abstracted from the real once made, arbitrarily extracted from the real like a sterile double. Hence, we no longer understand anything either of the mechanism of differentiation or of the mechanism of creation. (Deleuze, 1991, p. 98) What is remarkable in the passage above is that it contains two expressions that lend themselves exquisitely to a Deleuze-driven reading of design, as an exhortation (of sort) to dislodge design from the realm of the possible in order to nudge it into the realm of the virtual. First, the sleight of hand can be interpreted as referring to design as cunning science, deception, and craftiness; design as metis.7 Metis is astute intelligence, “the ability to act quickly, effectively and prudently within ever-changing contexts” (Johnson, 1998, p. 53). It emphasizes a local knowledge that is end-oriented, rather than process-driven. Second, to project backward refers to the act of retrofitting what is fabricated “in the image of what resembles it” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 212) – what Deleuze calls the “defect of the possible” (ibid.). In design terms, it is about denying the encounter with the unexpected that may emerge in any process-driven design, or else manufacturing such encounter so that it fits the original design blueprint. The value of looking at design through the lens of Deleuze’s virtual appears increasingly clear. I will return to this topic later. For the moment, let us examine in more depth the nature of the virtual and its actualization. To start with, it is important to reiterate one aspect concerning the nature of the virtual.The virtual is fully real, only not actual, and it should not be confused with some “vague notion”, nor “with the possible which lacks reality” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 279). Deleuze remarks that “the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object – as though the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 209). The virtual, that is, the embryonic, far from being undetermined, is completely determined, and yet it is only a part of the object. Another part is determined by actualization. Put differently, every object is double, made of “unequal odd halves” (ibid.) that however do not resemble each other. This is why, continues Deleuze,

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imagination plays such a crucial role in the process of actualization. For an object to be actualized is to create difference and divergence, something that has not been seen before. But it is imagination only that crosses domains, orders and levels, knocking down the partitions coextensive with the world, guiding our bodies and inspiring our souls, grasping the unity of mind and nature; a larval consciousness which moves endlessly from science to dream and back again. (Deleuze, 1994, p. 220) Moreover, the actualization of the virtual is always a matter of difference and divergence. “Actualization breaks with resemblance as a process no less than it does with identity as a principle” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 212). This is why only actualization is “genuine creation” (ibid.) and true difference takes place only in the inventive drama of actualization, when a contraction of virtuality occurs that contains the germs of yet more virtual events to come. Only actualization, then, is genuine creation because it breaks with the principle of identity, while opening up new problem frames that question the existent. Here we reach the most remarkable aspect of actualization as far as design is concerned. Actualization is nothing but the creation of problems. It is always problematic, and it is creative precisely because it is a problematic and problematizing event. The possible is problematized by the introduction of the unforeseen, and this is what opens up to the creation of the new. In design terms this means to acknowledge the presence of an undesigned at the very core of design, as a force to work with if genuine innovation is to be achieved.

(More or less) predictable adventures in time The insistence on the processuality of matter and equally on design as a process, as the result of a continuous actualization of the virtual, is as crucial as it is easily overlooked. The reason why we register reality as static is because what really are fluid states are perceived as static crystallizations frozen in artificial isolation, while they are (very) slowly thresholding one into the next. Each form is only a temporary phase in a process in which each phase seems to contain all the others. Put differently, each form seems to contain virtually all the potential forms belonging to the same continuum.To use Kwinter’s expression, forms are not fixed things, but “continuous metastable events” (Kwinter, 1992, p. 59), “always new and unpredictable unfoldings shaped by their adventures in time” (Kwinter, 1992, p. 60 – emphasis added).8 The actualization of the virtual is precisely this adventure in time that involves a developmental passage from one phase of form into another. Kwinter explains: Once time is introduced into this system, a form can gradually unfold on this surface as a historically specific flow of matter that actualizes (resolves, incarnates) the forces converging on the plane.These are the phenomenal forms that we conventionally associated with our living world. What we have generally failed to understand about them is that they exist, enfolded in a virtual space, but are actualized (unfolded) only in time as a suite of morphological events and differentiations ever-carving themselves into the epigenetic landscape. (Kwinter, 1992, p. 63)

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A suggestive example of how these “adventures in time” manifest themselves is given by smart materials. Smart materials can change in response to changing external conditions and can sense, and respond to, variations in their surrounding through a combination of intrinsic properties and context-based circumstances of use. An instance of this behavioural capacity is given by self-healing concrete (Howes and Laughlin, 2012).9 The key issue is that responsiveness inserts time into material variability. In other words, smart materials are coproduced in a duration, and this is why they can also be described as becoming materials – capable of undergoing their very own adventures in times (Bergström et al., 2010). Moreover, smart materials’ capacities allow us to think of matter on a continuum, with more or less pronounced degrees of predictability. For instance, DeLanda examines the opposite poles of this continuum and describes industrially produced steel and glass as “well-disciplined materials” (DeLanda, 2004, p. 20).These materials have been stripped of impurities and transformed into reliable resources, and are both homogenous (uniform in composition) and isotropic (with identical properties in all directions). Thus, their behaviour is entirely predictable, and their performance is rigorously standardized.10 On the opposite side of the spectrum, we find smart materials possessing a richer material complexity, richer material information and higher morphogenetic driver capacities.These capacities are not restricted of course to smart materials only. Wood, for instance, as we are going to see shortly, is heterogeneous, anisotropic and subject to irregularities. Two design precedents are briefly described below to illuminate this. Both show the variability of matter whose highly contingent singularities emerge under specific conditions. Both show how responsiveness can be embedded in matter – whether in a no-tech responsive architectural object, or in a hybrid material between the organic and the inorganic. The first example is HygroScope (2012), a meteorosensitive morphogenetic design experiment that uses computational morphogenesis and exploits the behavioural capacities of wood to explore responsive architecture (Figure 3.1).11 Designed by architect Achim Menges and hosted by the Permanent Collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, HygroScope exploits the dimensional instability of wood in relation to moisture content to create a climate responsive architectural morphology. Suspended within a humidity controlled glass case, the model opens and closes in response to climate changes with no need for any technical equipment or energy. Mere fluctuations in relative humidity trigger the changes of material-innate movement. The material structure itself is the machine. The second example is the Amoeba surface-adapting trainer, a conceptual prototype that seeks to probe the future of new protocell-based materials by using 3D printed biotechnology to create a second skin around the wearer’s foot (Figure.3.2).12 Protocells synchronize to the individual foot thanks to their responsive and reconfigurable capacities. They adapt in real time to the current activity of the runner by adding extra support in high impact areas. Protocells and CLE (Cell-like Entities) are hybrids in between the living and the nonliving engineered from lifeless liquid chemicals manufactured artificially in laboratory conditions. Although they rely on the basic principles of living organisms (biomolecular reaction networks that couple genome to a function), and exhibit behaviours usually associated with living organisms (adaptation to the environment, movement, self-aggregation in colonies) they do not qualify as living, as they cannot reproduce or evolve. Protocells and CLE are the result of bottom-up, emerging processes and this differentiates them from the reengineering on living organisms in synthetic biology, which is a top-down approach. Currently focused on the design of smart biosensors to capture physical, chemical and biological

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FIGURE 3.1 HygroScope: meteorosensitive

morphology. 2012

Permanent collection, Centre Pompidou Paris Achim Menges. Institute for Computational Design ©ICD University of Stuttgart

environmental variations, protocell research has the potential to revolutionize not only the way materials are made, but also how they go on making the world.13 These examples intend to show, albeit succinctly and partially, that what counts, above all, is the ‘adventure in time’ their material variability express. However, it must be also understood that the deployability of the morphogenetic model should not be restricted to material-led instances only. On the contrary, if these examples show the possibilities of a morphogenetical

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FIGURE 3.2 Amoeba

protocell trainer. Conceptual prototype. 2012.

Shamees Aden ©Shamees Aden

model for design where the material is the key driver, the potential of this model lies, I argue, in its scalability to other design typologies. The question is, then, can morphogenesis be applied to design instances characterized by the coexistence of material and immaterial elements such as for instance product/service systems (PSS)? Services and product/service systems are mostly composed of intangible functionalities, and the most relevant of these immaterial dimensions is time. Thus, PSS can be described as “a series of events distributed in time, in which users are supposed to interact with a predesigned set of elements” (Morelli, 2002, p. 11). Unlike products which exist both in space and time, and are produced and consumed at different times, services exist only in time: “services come into existence at the same moment they are being provided and used” (Morelli, 2002, p. 5). It can therefore be said that the pre-use of a service (its blueprint) corresponds to that service’s potential state, while the use proper of said service (when it actually takes place, or its kinetic state) is its actualization (Shostack, 1982).Taken together, these two interwoven states of a service – the virtual and the actual – create an ecology with specific, designable characteristics, but also, I maintain, with undesignable ones. It is at the actualization phase where the untapped and not fully predictable potentialities of the virtual take place. As pointed out earlier, design is not a thing, but a process. Increasingly, it is about the creation not just of products, but of ecologies of products, services, and experiences, where tangible touchpoints are no longer the key unique outcome. Rather, the tangibility of these touchpoints serves to accompany and signpost the user’s journey across the service blueprint provided. If a designer’s perspective should focus on how a product/service system ecology “takes form in all of its phases” (Morelli, 2002, p. 17), then it is important to adopt a design model that pays attention to how both the material and the immaterial dimensions cohabit and to the constellation of experiences potentially emerging from it. This is why we must look more closely at the transition from the virtual to the actual.

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The virtual: problem and contingency The transition from the virtual to the actual should be seen as the problematic and problematizing relationship between what is and what could be. As mentioned earlier, actualization is the creation of problems; and the reality of the virtual is to be a “problem to be solved” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 212), a problem that goes on to create – not contain – its own solutions. This is why the actualization of the virtual has plenty to offer design, if we take design, as we do in this chapter, as the process of capturing and materializing the not-yet. In other words, by focusing on the problematization inherent to the transition from the virtual to the actual, design can shift from a problem-solving to a problem-finding enterprise. An approach that moves away from design simply intended as problem-solving has also been described as a shift from “designing solutions to designing possibilities” (Jensen, 2014, p. 39). This possibilitydriven approach is deeply rooted in the complexity of human experience, and its unpredictability and contingency. This focus on problem-finding resonates with what Deleuze asserts in Bergsonism (1991) where he writes that “true freedom lies in a power to decide, to constitute problems themselves . . . the truth is that in philosophy and even elsewhere it is a question of finding the problem and consequently of positing it, even more than solving it” (Deleuze, 1991, p. 15). To articulate this point, Deleuze makes a clear distinction between discovery and invention. Discovery has to do with simply stated problems that already contain their own solution. Existing solutions needs simply to be uncovered, and such uncovering, or discovery, concerns something that already exists and would certainly happen eventually. Invention, on the other hand, is what “gives being to what did not exist”, and manifests what “might never have happened” (ibid.). Invention, then, concerns the creation of the terms by which a problem will be stated. It is invention, rather than discovery, with which design should be firmly involved. Indeed, for Deleuze, the activity of thinking itself is often misconceived as the search for solutions to problems, a prejudice that has its roots in the social and pedagogical system of formal education (the school), where the teacher is the person who poses the problem and the pupil the person who solves by discovering i.e. uncovering the correct solution (Deleuze, 1991, p. 15). Real problems, on the other hand have no given solution and that is why they are problems: because they must generate solutions through the interplay of divergent, unplanned components, a process whereby the virtual keeps on insisting and resisting. The known, the already established are disrupted by the unexpected that enters the process of creation as an agent to contend with, as a force to be reckoned with and, crucially, as a material to work with. For design, the lesson is clear. No real problem is given which contains apriori its own solution. If it does, then it is not a real problem, but a mere “solution rearranged into an interrogative form” (Evens, 2010, p. 153) – still dwelling in the realm of the possible. Instead, a real problem will be truly engaging with creation precisely to the extent it deals with the unexpected and the contingent out of which the new emerges – the realm of the virtual. For design, this is a profound lesson against retrofitting and in favour of creativity and innovation. It prompts design not to be satisfied with an outcome-oriented, problem-solving identity, but to be relentlessly seeking to engage with new modes of interrogating and questioning the existent. The existent calls for design’s very own questioning. “Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of fundamental

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encounter” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 139). What needs to be remarked is the contingent nature of this encounter, and the fact that, no matter its form or tone, this encounter “can only be sensed” (ibid.). Put differently, this encounter is not about recognition, that is, a way of experiencing the sensible in known ways by recalling it or imagining it. Rather, what is sensed “moves the soul, ‘perplexes’ it – in other words, forces it to pose a problem: as though the object of the encounter, the sign, were the bearer of a problem – as though it were a problem” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 140). The force of the encounter suggests that there is always something accidental about the virtual. The virtual is accidental because it follows no internal plan or teleology. “There is no preconception in the virtual, only a working out, a working through”, to use digital media theorist Aden Evens’ expression (Evens, 2010, p. 150). Anything can happen. In this sense, the virtual is unintended. It embraces the unexpected. It cannot be predicted in its outcomes. Therefore, to engage with the virtual concerns experimentation (not prediction), risk (not predetermination), urge (rather than deliberation). Ultimately, it is always about the virtual seizing you, not you using the virtual as an instrument. Ultimately, the virtual cannot be mapped or planned. The virtual cannot be designed. To engage with the virtual we must therefore be prepared to leap into the unknown, deal with contingency, and the new problems that arise from it.14 For philosopher Robin Mackay contingency at its simplest “refers to the attempt to think events that take place but need not take place: events that could be, or could have been, otherwise” (Mackay, 2011, p. 1). If we take contingency as “that which thinking can grasp only as event”, then what is firmly emphasized is the unpredictability, the indeterminacy proper of the event, something “that happens to us, that comes from outside, that simply ‘strikes’ without any possible prevision” (Mackay, 2011, p. 2).15 Armed with these insights on the two interrelated aspects of the virtual – the problem and the contingent – we can now draw some provisional thoughts on what they might mean for design, as well as speculate on how they might inform a new model of design research. The process of design is possessed by an obvious tension between the desire to capture and determine form, on one side, and the need to acknowledge and work through contingency on the other. A tension exists, in other words, between form-capture and the un-designability of the virtual; between the expected, safe solution to the problem or issue at stake (realm of the possible), and the unpredictable, yet truly innovative operation that only can deliver the new (realm of the virtual). This aleatory, problematizing, yet utterly material, force is what I call the undesigned within design.

The undesigned within design As mentioned earlier, the virtual should not be confused with the vague. However, in The Architecture of Continuity (2008) Spuybroek persuasively articulates a logic of vagueness to describe a new type of morphogenetic, intensive architecture which deserves attention. Drawing on logician Charles Sanders Peirce’s definition of vagueness as potential – “potential means indeterminate yet capable of determination . . . the vague always tends to become determinate, simply because its vagueness does not determine to be vague. . . . It is not determinately nothing” (Spuybroek, 2008, p. 247) – Spuybroek explains that vagueness always exists in between two determinate states, affording the lack of determinacy necessary for the new to emerge. This brings to mind Deleuze’s “entire machine of determination and indetermination” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 276): thought creates difference precisely as what straddles these two. In Deleuze’s terms vagueness becomes a groundlessness swarming with differences:

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“what, after all, are Ideas, with their constitutive multiplicity, if not these ants which enter and leave through the fracture in the I?” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 277). If continuity is the plane of immanence, vagueness has to do with the indetermination of the virtual, the unforeseen.Yet, it is not a state of amorphous indeterminacy. In the same way in which non-linearity, rather than a rupture with the line, expresses line’s own bendability, so vagueness demands rigour, clearly stated rules and scripts to generate the determinate out of the indeterminate. Continuity and variation produce things incessantly, but they produce discrete objects, not “slime or oceans”, says Spuybroek. In fact, continuity is vagueness insofar as “it understands things in the opposite way to what we know as elementary, not as prior to relations but as a posterior result of relationality. It is a universe where relationality is a given, and things – objects, beings, events – emerge from it” (Spuybroek, 2008, p. 144). If the encounter of continuity and variation underpins the process through which design grows and evolves in time and in a range of scale (from the giga to the nano, from the object to the system), Spuybroek insists that this process should always be viewed within a historical framework. “The new doesn’t emerge out of nothing, not even from a fully mobile state; it emerges from that which is already organized” (Spuybroek, 2008, p. 188). This seems obvious, but needs restating as it emphasizes the role of contingency in producing the rupture with the existent that, alone, creates innovation. Contingency becomes another agent in the process, another force, a medium to work with as it “introduces a new kind of precarity into our dealings with the present and the future. It reveals that we are ‘worked’ out from inside and out by anonymous materials” (Mackay, 2011, p. 3). The forces of contingency are assimilated here to materials. Tangible, raw, substantial and, like matter, subjected too to the process of morphogenesis and material variation. The problematizing combined force of vagueness and contingency, as the interwoven components of the virtual, should strike a chord with design, insofar as they seem to contradict the essence of what design is conventionally taken to be, namely, the intentional planning, the ideal blueprint, even the cunning deceit (metis, again) – as philosopher Vilém Flusser famously wrote.16 This conventional view is challenged by insisting on the contradiction and the resistance that the problematizing complicity between vagueness and contingency brings to design.Vagueness and contingency are here taken as two complementary disruptive forces impinging upon the design process.Vagueness, as the continuity of immanence out of which all things are created through a process of morphogenesis and emergence. Contingency, as its aleatory by-product, the unforeseen terra incognita ensuring that no drive to resemblance, no retrofitting impulse can sneak in and taint the process. As such, vagueness and contingency constitute the undesigned at the core of design.

Concluding remarks Of all the tensions design is currently traversed by and of all the propensities that propel it outward (dematerialization, digitalization, social innovation, critical interrogation of the existent), the most relevant to the aims of the present chapter concerns a renewed sensitivity towards materiality taken in its morphogenetic capacities. This should be accompanied and expressed by the contribution of ideas drawn on various brands of philosophical materialism. The extent to which these ideas can percolate into design theory and practice will have an impact on the design of the future, and on the future of design. The challenge for design and for designers is to take on board, embrace and question materialist interrogations in

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an affirmative, critical and innovative way. Design needs to interact with a broad notion of morphogenesis, and relate to morphogenesis not as something concerning only a materiality to be appropriated and imposed upon. Rather, morphogenesis should be acknowledged, explored and embraced as a key interlocutor of design research through practice, so to eschew the limits and traps of design’s self-appointed teleological destiny. Furthermore, as the chapter has shown, a morphogenetic perspective indicates that design should view in a different light the materiality it engages with. No longer passive matter that obeys laws, but active matter informed by morphogenetic principles. In this immanent model, the designer no longer imposes a form, but can only tease it out of the material. To think of the designer as a facilitator does not mean however to substitute a modernist god with an essentialist one. The designer becomes the individual able to tease form out of the formless, precisely because s/ he is engaged in, and interacts with, the manifold forces emerging during the design process. As DeLanda puts it: We may now be in a position to think about the origin of form and structure, not as something imposed from the outside on an inert matter, not as a hierarchical command from above as in an assembly line, but as something that may come from within the materials, as form that we tease out of those materials as we allow them to have their say in the structures we create. (DeLanda, 2004, p. 21) But we have to be cautious here.We cannot say that matter contains already the form that the designer will tease out.This is precisely the difference between the possible and the virtual this chapter has outlined.What must be emphasized is the non-linearity of the process, its aleatory and contingent nature, its problematizing effects. These, taken together, can prompt design to interrogate reality while engaging with the unpredictability of form-finding. In this process, whose outcome cannot be known in advance, where intensities impinge on each other, the designer applies force on matter in the same way as matter acts upon the designer – both never merely reacting. Thus, if form-finding is the result of a collectivity of agencies, where the designer themselves is thought of as another raw material with his/her own capacities and affects, whose virtualities are actualized alongside the unfolding of matter, then design becomes the formidable process (yes, the adventure) whereby the conditions that allow the not-yet to become the now cannot but hinge on the unforeseeable, unpredictable, undesigned at its very core. It will be only by an experimentation that engages with the aleatory, contigent, problematizing force of the virtual, that the new can be captured from the future and become the tangible outcome to which design aspires.

Notes 1 See Marenko and Brassett (2015) for a recent work that engages design with the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. In particular, see the editors’ Introduction to the volume. 2 The secret of empiricism, says Deleuze, is precisely this: “Empiricism is a mysticism and a mathematicism of concepts, but precisely one which treats the concept as object of an encounter, as hereand-now, or rather as an Erewhon from which emerge inexhaustibly ever new, differently distributed ‘heres’ and ‘nows’. Only an empiricist could say: concepts are indeed things, but things in their free and wild state, beyond ‘anthropological predicates’. I make, remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentred centre, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and differentiates them” (Deleuze, 1994, p. XX).

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3 The reference is to Spinoza’s single substance (Deleuze, 1988), as well as to Henri Bergson’s idea that matter is made up of “modifications, perturbations, changes of tensions or of energy and nothing else” (Bergson, 1991, p. 201). For Bergson, both matter and other forms of life are different modalities of the same singular élan vital. 4 Architect theorist Neil Leach (2009) has written about the paradigm shift from the postmodern insistence with appearance to new concerns with performance and material functionality as an indicator of a growing interest in morphogenesis. 5 As architect Peter Eisenman reminds us, “it was Leibniz who first conceived of matter as explosive. He turned his back to Cartesian rationalism, and argued that in the labyrinth of the continuous the smallest element is not the point but the fold” (Eisenman, 1992, p. 425). 6 Emphasising the etymology of the words, Leach writes how “form must be informed by considerations of performative principles to subscribe to a logic of material formation” (Leach, 2009, p. 34). 7 Media theorist Robert Johnson describes the concept of metis as “probably the most unexplored, yet possibly the most powerful, aspect of user knowledge” (Johnson, 1998, p. 53). It derives from the ancient Greek mythology where Metis was the name of Zeus’s first wife – who Zeus swallows as soon as she conceives Athena. 8 The term adventure used by Kwinter to describe the process of actualization of the virtual (1992) reoccurs in philosopher Keith Ansell Pearson (2002). 9 Self-healing concrete “reacts to environmental triggers and heals itself when stressed. Regular concretes contain calcium hydroxide, but a recent development in self-healing concrete contains a healing agent sodium silicate, which reacts with the calcium hydroxide when cracked or damaged. This create a gel-like material that hardens in about a week, blocking the pores in the concrete and re-strengthening the weakened material” (Howes and Laughlin, 2012, p. 196). 10 Not to mention the socio-technical implications of such a homogenization procedure in the form of a deskilling in the craftsmanship required to handle and work these materials, with labour and trade implications. 11 Achim Menges (2012) www.achimmenges.net/?p=5083 12 The Amoeba shoe has been developed by multidisciplinary designer Shamees Aden, an MA Textile Futures graduate from Central Saint Martins London, in partnership with scientist Dr Martin Hanczyc from the University of Southern Denmark to fabricate a tangible protocell shoe for 2050. http://shameesaden.com/ 13 See the special issue of AD Architectural Design (2011) on Protocell Architecture, 81, 2 (in particular Armstrong). 14 Contingency, as Keith Ansell Pearson notes, is at the centre of Henri Bergson’s philosophy: “Bergson’s thinking of creative evolution places a notion of contingency at the centre of its concerns and conceives duration precisely in terms of an interruption and discontinuity” (Ansell Pearson, 2002, p. 74). 15 On contingency in relation to diagrammatic and uncertainty, in particular with reference to computational design see Marenko, 2015a. 16 See “About the Word Design”, in Flusser’s seminal collection The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design, pp. 17–21.

References Ansell Pearson, K. (2002). Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life. London, Routledge Armstrong, R. (2011). How Protocells Can Make ‘Stuff ’ Much More Interesting. Architectural Design Special Issue: Protocell Architecture. 81, 2, pp. 68–77 Bergson, H. (1991). Matter and Memory. New York, Zone Books Bergström, J., Clark, B., Frigo, A., Mazé, R., Redström, J. and Vallgårda, A. (2010). Becoming Materials: Material Forms and Forms of Practice. Digital Creativity. 21, 3, pp. 155–172 DeLanda, M. (1992). Nonorganic Life. In: J. Crary and S. Kwinter, eds., Incorporations. Zone 6. New York, Zone, pp. 129–167 DeLanda, M. (1999). Immanence and Transcendence in the Genesis of Form. In: I. Buchanan, ed., A Deleuzian Century? Durham, NC and London, Duke University Press, pp. 119–134

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DeLanda, M. (2002). Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London and New York, Continuum DeLanda, M. (2004). Material Complexity. In: N. Leach, D. Turnbull and C.Williams, eds., Digital Tectonics. Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 14–21 DeLanda, M. (2009) Material Evolvability and Variability. In: L. Spuybroek, ed., The Architecture of Variation. London, Thames and Hudson, pp. 10–17 Deleuze, G. (1988). Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco, City Lights Books. Deleuze, G. (1991). Bergsonism. New York, Zone Books Deleuze, G. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London, The Athlone Press Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition. London, The Athlone Press Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations. New York, Columbia University Press Deleuze, G. (2006). Two Regimes of Madness:Texts and Interviews 1975–1995. New York, Semiotext(e) Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London, The Athlone Press Eisenman, P. (1992). Unfolding Events. In: J. Crary and S. Kwinter, eds., Incorporations: Zone 6. New York, Zone, pp. 423–427 Evens, A. (2010). Digital Ontology and Example. In: P. Gaffney, ed., Deleuze, Science, and the Force of the Virtual. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, pp. 147–168. Howes, P. and Laughlin, Z. (2012). Material Matters: New Materials in Design. London, Black Dog Publishing Jensen, J.L. (2014). Designing for Profound Experience. Design Issues. 30, 3, pp. 39–52 Johnson, R. (1998). User-Centered Technology: A Rhetorical Theory for Computers and Other Mundane Artifacts. Albany, SUNY Press Kwinter, S. (1992). Landscapes of Change: Boccioni’s “Stati d’animo” as a General Theory of Models. In: Assemblage, 19. Cambridge, MA and London, MIT Press, pp. 50–65 Kwinter, S (1998). Leap in the Void: A New Organon? In: C. Davidson, ed., Anyhow. Cambridge, MA and London, MIT Press, pp. 22–27 Kwinter, S. (2002). Architectures of Time:Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture. Cambridge, MA and London, MIT Press Kwinter, S. (2007). Far From Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture. Barcelona and New York, Actar Leach, N. (2009). Digital Morphogenesis. In: Architectural Design. 79, 1, London,Wiley Academy, pp. 32–37 Mackay, R. (2011). The Medium of Contingency. Falmouth, Urbanomic in Association with Ridinghouse Marenko, B. (2015a). Digital Materiality, Morphogenesis and the Intelligence of the Technodigital Object. In: B. Marenko and J. Brassett, eds., Deleuze and Design. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 107–138. Marenko, B. (2015b). When Making Becomes Divination: Uncertainty and Contingency in Computational Glitch-Events. Design Studies: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Design Research. 41, Part A. Special issue: Computational Making. T. Knight and T.Vardoulli, eds., London, Elsevier, pp. 110–125. Marenko, B. and Brassett, J. eds. (2015). Deleuze and Design. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press Massumi, B. (1998). Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible. In: S. Perrella, ed., Hypersurface Architecture: Architectural Design, 68, 5/6, John Wiley and Sons, pp. 16–24 Morelli, N. (2002). Designing Product/Service Systems: A methodological Exploration. Design Issues. 18, 3. pp. 3–17 Shostack, G.L. (1982). How to Design a Service. European Journal of Marketing. 16, 1 pp. 49–63 Spuybroek, L. (2008). The Architecture of Continuity: Essays and Conversations. Rotterdam V2_Publishing and NAI Publishers

4 CRITICAL OPERATIONALITY Energy and Co-Designing Communities (ECDC) by the Interaction Research Studio (IRS), Goldsmiths, London (2010–2014) Katherine Moline

Introduction The terms by which practice can be said to satisfy the definition of research are hotly contested in art and design. Key to the debate is the different expectations of criticality in research and in practice. Tensions between the terms ‘criticism’ and ‘practice’ can be traced to debates in architecture and design in the 1960s and 1970s. This chapter seeks to clarify certain terms in this debate to demonstrate their relevance for design practices that question institutional norms and conventions. To unpack the complex issues that inform current debates on criticism and practice, this chapter reflects on a recent large-scale design project engaged in research and its relationship to art practice and history.The following case-study of the Energy and Co-Designing Communities (ECDC) project by the Interaction Research Studio (IRS) at Goldsmiths College, London (2010–14) considers how the work was influenced by Surrealism and explored irrationality as a countermove to instrumentalisation, as well as the social pacts between producers and consumers that shape design and the significance of interdisciplinarity in art and design. In conclusion, this paper draws out the interrelationships of operational critique and ‘undesign’. The ECDC project explored the possibilities of human-computer interaction (HCI) design in energy demand reduction. In response to government policy to distribute energy metres to every home in the United Kingdom by 2014 (Boucher, Cameron and Jarvis, 2012, p. 612) the ECDC designers questioned the purported efficacy of individual monitors in creating behavioural change and ‘undoing’ everyday habits (p. 614). Through fieldtrips, workshops, extensive workbooks, cultural probes, and the design of a speculative design device called an Energy Babble, the studio sought to explore the everyday practices of energy consumption with ‘transition communities’. Transition communities are grassroots initiatives that develop cultural and economic alternatives to capitalism based on the principles of selfsufficiency, local relevance, and resilience to resource depletion and climate change. The project explored the possibilities of design interventions in the situated practices of transition communities committed to reducing dependency on fossil fuels. The chapter argues that contradictory tensions in the ECDC project refute the social convention that design alone can adequately address the crises emerging as a result of climate change. Interpreting this as

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a challenge to mainstream expectations of design, this chapter argues that ECDC corresponds with a number of the requirements of research as it is defined in recent practice-as-research debates. While questions remain about the immediate usefulness of the research to the communities it engaged, ECDC raised important contentions about the purpose of design.

Operative criticism and critical operationality Scholarly convention insists that architects, artists and designers demonstrate the critical capacity of practice in university research contexts. Disputes over this requirement abound, although aspects of the definition of critical practice emerged in the 1970s when architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994) introduced the term ‘operative criticism’ to describe what he saw as an instrumentalisation that distorted history and criticism in architecture. He defined operative criticism as history interpreted by architects to support and justify their practice and saw it as replacing ‘analytical rigor’ with ‘ready-made judgment’ (Tafuri, 1980, p. 153). Theorist Fredric Jameson explained that Tafuri’s rejection of operative criticism was based on its tendency to present ‘an illusory historical analysis’ that he saw as ‘in reality a manifesto’ (Jameson, 1985/88, p. 45). In other words, architects – and, I would add, designers – produce selective if not self-interested historical interpretations to promote their practice. Recent interpretations of Tafuri’s argument draw attention to his contention that architecture should attend to its social and political contexts rather than its institutional traditions. According to architecture historian Andrew Leach, Tafuri’s objection to operative criticism was its articulation of architecture solving ‘immediate problems’ and merely justifying the status quo and institutional conventions (Leach, 2002, pp. 7–9). As Leach notes, operative criticism ‘fails’ for Tafuri ‘for not being critical enough of the very device that maintains architecture’s insularity’ (Leach, 2005, p. 239). Tafuri justified his analysis of operative criticism on the principle that architecture and, in my view, design, must question its effectiveness ‘on the relations of production’ and the social relationships that a building, artwork or design constructs (Tafuri, 1974, p. 165). There is some truth in Tafuri’s proposition that historical accounts by practitioners too easily collapse into self-serving promotion. It is a shortcoming of design criticism that undervalues the contextualisation of design practice within contemporary and historical models. A second shortcoming is the convention that it is only designers who are sufficiently licensed to comment on their work.

Critical operativity and operational critique at HfG, Ulm Prior to Tafuri’s analysis of operative criticism, Tomás Maldonado and Gui Bonsiepe also opposed design histories and practices that fortified professional insularity and recommended instead the critical operativity later propounded by Tafuri. They expanded their views in the curriculum at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (HfG Ulm) (1953–1968) by proposing that design actively engage with industry rather than critique society from a distance or be cut off from the social field. Under Max Bill’s inaugural rectorship (1953–1955), HfG Ulm intended to revive the Bauhaus program (1919–1933) after its closure by the Nazis prior to WWII. The Bauhaus program modelled design as a combination of art, craft, technology, and form giving and positioned the designer as an artist. Upon the commencement of Maldonado’s direction between 1955 and 1964, HfG Ulm aimed to demystify design activity, replacing artistic intuition with methodical and scientific approaches to design. Expressed in slogans such as ‘No more Art, the Street [is] more important than the Museum’ (Aicher, 1975, p. 231),

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HfG Ulm redefined product design and visual communication as the use and management of information in ways that could be easily assimilated by the recipient. The HfG Ulm program redefined design as an operational science that embraced sociology, psychology and economic considerations, among others, and sought dialogue with manufacturers to contribute to the reconstruction of German industry after WWII (Fezer, 2008). As a protégé of Maldonado’s at HfG Ulm, Gui Bonsiepe described this approach as facilitating ‘cognitive metabolism’ (Bonsiepe, 2000, p. 6). By framing design methodology as a social science of consumerism that synthesised economics, communication and the environment, HfG Ulm aspired to legitimate design and distinguish it from fine art in its capacity to contribute to the self-determination of the user, or client, or the economy (Bonsiepe, 1999, p. 156; Fathers and Bonsiepe, 2003, p. 53). Despite its ambition to place design within political, social and environmental contexts, HfG Ulm has been criticised for its insistence that design must engage with industry (Spitz, 2002; Burdeck, 2005). Bonsiepe and Maldonado point out that such criticism overlooks HfG Ulm’s inclusion of critical reflection in design education – in particular, the ‘active criticism’ of the implications of design’s cultural, economic and technological effects and consequences (Bonsiepe, 1999, p. 124). Maldonado’s conception of design as an ‘alternative, engaged consumer science’ ultimately resulted in questions about the benefits of science to design (Betts, 2004, p. 177). In order to distance design from artistic intuition, Maldonado and Bonsiepe modified the school’s philosophy by 1965, criticising how functionalist methods had become ideological (Fezer, 2008). At this time, both promoted the view that designers must assume the role of ‘agent provocateurs’ rather than being servants of capital when working in partnership with industry towards social reform (Betts, 2004, p. 176). In Bonsiepe’s view, ‘active criticism’ (1999, p. 124) in design demanded ‘operational critique’ (1999, p. 154). Rather than maintaining a critical distance from industry and present social conditions, for Bonsiepe ‘operational critique’ meant intervention through ‘design actions that open new or different opportunities for action’ (Bonsiepe, 1999, pp. 154–155) and required engaging with industry and its social context. Most recently, designer Jan van Toorn combined these terms and introduced the concept of ‘operative critique’, which he defined as experimental design developed in ‘parallel’ to professional design, which draws together ‘theoretical thinking’, ‘communicative strategy’ and ‘working method with actual experiment and artistic invention’ (van Toorn, 2010, p. 54).This was based on his proposal in 1994 that designers frame their practice as ‘operative criticism’ (van Toorn, 1994 p. 325) and pursue political engagement by working on ‘real social problems’ from an ‘oppositional stance’ that challenges neo-liberal capitalism (van Toorn, 1994, p. 323). Definitions of practice, history and theory, criticism and critique continue to be contested in debates on practice-as-research in art and design (Koskinen et al., 2011; McNamara, 2012). This essay contends that a combination of Bonsiepe’s and Maldonado’s definition of designers as agent provocateurs engaged in the active criticism of design’s cultural, economic and technological effects, and van Toorn’s idea that designers oppose economic and political conservatism, informs the work of the IRS at Goldsmiths. In recycling the HfG Ulm definition of design as operational critique, ECDC and the Energy Babble brought earlier Ulmian debates into the era of climate change. For the sake of clarity, I will refer to IRS’s position as operational critique in the following case study. Here, I argue that the practice of the IRS, exemplified by ECDC and the Energy Babble, opens up significant questions for design in practice-based research concerning: one, the efficacy of means-end rationality in design; two,

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the social pacts of HCI design; and, three, the significance of interdisciplinarity in art and design as a form of ‘undesign’. Undesign is defined in this context as the production of practices and projects that articulate design in relation to political, environmental and sociocultural systems that configure design. Drawing from architectural theorist Diana Agrest’s definition of non-design as ‘the way in which different cultural systems interrelate and give form to the built world’ (Agrest, 1974, p. 200), undesign opens up interpretations of the social meaning of design in relation to other cultural systems. I see the term undesign as reflecting action rather than withdrawal.

ECDC The ECDC project was funded by the Research Councils UK Energy Program (RCUK). It is one of several projects that explored the possibility of the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent before 2050 (Wilkie, 2017, p. 88). The project sought to address the assumption of HCI that real-time feedback provided by energy demand metres supported consumers in modifying their energy consumption practices. Acknowledging that real-time feedback had only a short-term effect, the project investigated a wide range of contextual issues to understand energy consumption as ‘situated practices’ rather than a utilitarian problem that could be resolved by technology (Gaver et al., 2015, p. 1115). The designers aimed to ‘give voice to disparate energy and environmental problems, interests, practices, realities and publics that may co-exist or be in the process of coming into being’ (Wilkie, 2017, p. 91).The process combined a number of methodologies that the designers describe as ‘ludic action research’ (Gaver et al., 2015, p. 1116), ‘creative exploration’ (Gaver et al., 2015, p. 1117) and as the outcome of design collaboration with Science and Technology Studies. The studio’s ludic approach rejects utility and ‘galvanising a majority of opinion and behaviour’ and focuses instead on ‘allowing the diversity and richness of multiple views to emerge’ (Gaver et al., 2013, p. 3452) through appropriations of design by users that open up new possibilities for design users. The ‘co-design’ referred to in the title of the project included fieldtrips, workshops, extensive workbooks, and the distribution of cultural probe packs in transition communities, such as Low Carbon Living Ladock. The workshops with these communities explored questions such as: ‘How is people’s engagement with technology affected by who they trust?’ During the course of the project, the studio distributed Energy Babble devices – objects constructed from 3D printing, hand-made coils and injection-molded plastic – that collected and broadcast Twitterfeeds, government statistics and internet scrapes related to environmental news. This data was interspersed with commentary by Babble volunteers in a network of twenty-one locations (homes and offices) over a period of six months and, in the latter stages of the project, interjections by a Prompt Bot, to engage participant responses (Gaver et al., 2015, p. 1119). The deliberately random mix of information and commentary was broadcast in computer-generated synthesised voices available on Mac computers and reflected a celebration of design adhocism in communities engaged with energy reduction. With the Babble network, ECDC explored the emotional dimensions of energy usage and what the studio called the ‘potential’ of people’s imaginative application of technologies (Gaver et al., 2011, p. n.p.) (Figure 4.1). Although widely known for introducing cultural probes to design, the influence of avant-gardism in IRS designs is rarely investigated, despite the studio’s claims of drawing inspiration from Surrealism and their ambition for design-led discussion to prompt

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FIGURE 4.1  Babble

in-situ. Bill Gaver, Mike Michael, Tobie Kerridge, Liliana Ovale, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, Alex Wilkie and Jennifer Gabrys, Energy and Co-Designing Communities (ECDC) (2010–2014)

unrehearsed and unexpected ideas not dominated by the designer (Gaver, Dunne and Pacenti, 1999, p. 26; Gaver, et al., 2004, p. 54; Gaver, 2016, p. 12). In citing the field of fine art and exploring design as a practice distributed among many rather than solely the purview of the designer, the studio’s approach undesigns design. By interrupting the closed system of design as problem-solving and including the insights of other cultural systems, ECDC reveals the impossibility of addressing climate change within the bounded specialisation of design as it is currently defined. The influence of Surrealism – specifically collage, the juxtaposition of images and the tactics of ambiguity and absurdity – is also implicit in the IRS’s stated aim to open new perspectives on how design can operate with opacity and playfulness (Michael, 2017, p. 142). One explanation for omitting Surrealism’s influence on the studio’s work is the ongoing contested relationship between art and design as specialisations, and between theory and practice in design, that has taken place in the debates on operative criticism, critical operationality, operational critique and operative critique described previously. These historical debates about the differences and crossovers between history and practice raise questions surrounding designs that contest disciplinary norms. The following analysis seeks to address these shortcomings in design criticism and contribute to the debate about practice-based research by reflecting on the ECDC project as an exemplar of critical operationality that seeks to disrupt design conventions with Surrealist tactics. To do this ECDC will be considered in relation to the art-historical theories of avant-gardism and Surrealism.

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Peter Bürger on Surrealism For art theorist Peter Bürger the historical avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century undermined the bourgeois idea that art is independent from society and sought to promote art’s capacity to participate in the transformation of social and political conditions. His characterisation relies upon Karl Marx’s distinction between two types of criticism, that of system-immanent criticism and that of institutional critique. By system-immanent criticism, Marx meant that which focuses solely on historical precedent. One example of systemimmanent criticism Marx cites is the ‘critique Christianity leveled against paganism’; another is ‘that of Protestantism against Catholicism’ (Marx, 1973 cited in Bürger, 1984, p. 21). Bürger casts institutional critique as fundamentally more radical because it criticises the institutions and ideologies that shape particular practices. In common with the debates in architecture and design on operational critique and undesign, institutional critique in art rejects the boundaries and norms that define and shape art. Historical avant-garde movements, such as Surrealism, protested against instrumentalisation and aimed to turn that which conflicts with the ‘means-end rationality of bourgeois society’ into ‘life’s organising principle’ (Marx, cited in Bürger, 1984, p. 34). Surrealism was opposed to the organisation of human labour according to instrumental rationality and its valuing of efficiency and economy in the pursuit of a predetermined objective over and above critical reflection on the value of that objective. On this basis, Surrealist artists sought to undermine the commodification of art and attempted to reintegrate it into life by destroying the institutionalised vision of art as a sphere of practice separated from the wider social field. Thus, unlike system-immanent criticism, which responds to the techniques of preceding art practices, avant-gardist institutional critique rejects dominant conceptualisations of art as a separate totality. Acknowledging Surrealism’s tactical refusal of means-ends rationality opens up aspects of ECDC overlooked in design commentary on the project. For example, Surrealism’s exploration of unconscious drives, purposelessness and chance, the desire to overcome the bourgeois value system of propriety and self-control and a consequent repression of spontaneity, resonate when reflecting on ECDC’s challenge to the supposition that people’s choices are always logical and rational in HCI design. The title ‘Energy Babble’ immediately suggests the work’s engagement with irrationality. As a verb, ‘babble’ is synonymous with prattle or jabber and refers to rapid and incomprehensible speech. As a noun, it describes the sound of many people speaking at the same time. In other words, the title of the project names what it does: materially manifests a constant broadcast of divergent perspectives on energy consumption. The title emphasises the tensions between the outpouring of information, opinion and advice from heterogeneous sources involved in debates on climate change in the United Kingdom. The studio’s statement that Energy Babble was ‘motivated by a mixed and somewhat incommensurable set of intentions’ counters expectations that design is a process of rational deliberation that excludes all but the most dominant voices (Gaver et al., 2015, p. 1118). The ambiguous motivations of the designers interrupt means-end rationality in design and recall the studio’s commitment to preventing ‘easy interpretation’, instead provoking design users to ‘participate in making meaning’ (Gaver, Beaver and Bedford, 2003, p. 235). Calling on design users to interpret design resonates with Bonsiepe’s and Maldonado’s redefinition of designers as agent provocateurs, and van Toorn’s insistence that design pursue political engagements that oppose neo-liberal capitalism.

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FIGURE 4.2 ECDC

cultural probe. Bill Gaver, Mike Michael, Tobie Kerridge, Liliana Ovale, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, Alex Wilkie and Jennifer Gabrys, Energy and Co-Designing Communities (ECDC) (2010–2014)

The ECDC cultural probe pack that led to the design of the Energy Babble invited participants to playfully explore their everyday energy consumption.The cultural probe included cards that invited participants to write an obituary for their favourite appliance, confess a guilty energy usage secret, sketch the cosiest place in their home, write an imaginary conversation between a hairdryer and a candle, and describe the sight, pleasure, sound, pain, smell, feel and taste of energy (Figure 4.2). In these tasks, the cultural probe sought to reveal the unconscious desires of non-designer participants, and to provoke them to let go of associations of design with conscious control. In other words, it invoked surrealist practices, such as the psychic automatism and automatic writing by Surrealist artist André Breton (1924) in the design context. The ECDC cultural probe manifests in a material form that which conflicts with ‘means-end rationality’ and turns it into design’s ‘organising principle’ (Bürger, 1984, p. 34).

Thierry de Duve on the social pacts of practice In contrast to Bürger’s assertion that historical avant-gardes aimed to subvert instrumental rationality, art theorist Thierry de Duve explores how artistic avant-gardes have historically confronted audiences with the broken conventions of established social pacts in order to point to their redundancy or need for renovation. Modern artists – from the earliest emergence of avant-gardism – confronted a historical situation where given expectations, patrons and audiences of art had become shifting and unstable. Given the social and political changes that altered this service orientation to aristocratic patronage in fine art, de Duve claims that ‘avant-garde artists make the conventions (the rules) of

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their trade into the site for negotiation’ (de Duve, 1996, p. 64). His implicitly Marxist argument is that artists reflected the broader social, economic and political circumstances of modern western culture and sought to renegotiate and renovate tradition according to changed historical or social circumstances. At first glance, de Duve’s allusion to tradition in relation to avant-garde art is surprising. What he means by tradition, however, is artistic convention. In defining convention, he describes ‘technical conventions’ as the ‘know-how’ or ‘rules of making’ of a specialised occupation, and ‘aesthetic conventions (rules of judging)’ as largely guided by the society in which artworks are commissioned (de Duve, 1996, pp. 61–64).Whether or not an artistic convention is an unspoken pact or an explicitly signed document, for de Duve conventions are generalised, collective patterns of agreement that define the social pact that society has with a field at a particular moment in time. For de Duve, avant-gardes arise when the conditions surrounding a particular pact change. He argues that change ‘signals a pact broken with a faction of the public, at the same time as a demand for a new pact addressed to another faction’ (de Duve, 1996, p. 63). This process ‘presses the other’ to renegotiate ‘the technical-aesthetic conventions of the medium’ and break and renew the social pact (de Duve, 1996, p. 66). From this perspective, avant-garde artists and, I would argue, critical and speculative approaches in design, rouse a sentiment of dissent that questions the silencing of voices and practices other than those sanctioned by legitimising agencies and institutions such as universities, professional organisations, museums and publications. De Duve’s thesis on how artistic avant-gardes rework conventions provides a model for the interactions in ECDC that likewise question and renegotiate established pacts of design.The precarious conditions created by climate change have resulted in new demands of design, as exemplified in a newspaper headline that was produced at an ECDC workshop (‘Its Full!!! Climate refugees camp in Hyde Park’) (Figure 4.3). When sociologist Mike Michael, a collaborator in the ECDC project, described speculative design’s concern with ‘overspills’ and public responses that exceed the parameters established by researchers (Michael, 2012, p. 529) its connection with Surrealism became clear. Rather than limit design to the social pact of control that ignores unexpected events, he described overspills in speculative design as insights that generate new approaches to design. Michael’s account of speculative design contrasts with the definition by designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby which suggests that speculative design prompts reflection on interactions with design and creates ‘fictional worlds’,‘what-if scenarios’ and ‘cautionary tales’ (Dunne and Raby, 2013, p. 70, 86, 73). The definition of speculative design put forward by Michael is significant because it opens up the social pact of design. Incorporating overspills in design structures new processes that authorise the tacit knowledge and concerns of lay experts, as in the case of ECDC and climate change. Rather than present a simplified account of climate change, the studio included the complex of competing issues and interests. This interpretation is backed up by the studio’s published accounts of the process and ambitions for the research. In their words, the project: did not tend to centre on what we wanted the system to achieve or how the participants might engage with it. Instead, we decided to develop it because we felt a kind of satisfaction in being able to reflect back to the participants, in a somewhat mischievous way, the complicated mix of discourse, priorities and suggestions with which we saw them contending. (Gaver et al., 2015, p. 1118)

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FIGURE 4.3 Tabloid

headlines. Bill Gaver, Mike Michael, Tobie Kerridge, Liliana Ovale, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, Alex Wilkie and Jennifer Gabrys, Energy and Co-Designing Communities (ECDC), (2010–2014)

In terms of breaking technical conventions (rules of making) and aesthetic conventions (rules of judging) ECDC refused the technical convention in design to produce yet another gizmo or invention that promises to fix carbon emissions. In the process, the Babble challenged the convention by which design is assessed according to its immediate usefulness and attended to the short-termism and illusion of the current social pact of design.

Helmut Draxler on the logic of specialisation Rethinking the relationship between art and design, and challenging their separation as specialisations, has been a concern of art historian Helmut Draxler. Design’s insistence on specialisation, in Draxler’s view, blocks the possibilities of ‘critically addressing the relations and historical dynamism between the categories’ and forms a key barrier to the expansion of

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design discourse (Draxler, 2006, p. 152). He contends that as long as the polarisation of art and design is maintained, criticism (and I would contend practice) produces nothing other than the ‘logic of specialisation’ (Draxler, 2006, p. 151). He therefore re-examines the categories of art and design so that the intersections, crossovers and impure heritage of the two fields can be re-evaluated. This reshuffling rejects the separation of art and design in Bürger’s criticism of the recuperation of avant-garde strategies in commercial contexts, which Draxler claims is motivated by a pessimistic attitude towards the ‘decline of artistic integrity’ when it achieves institutional endorsement and commercial success (Draxler, 2006, p. 153). Draxler recommends that the core of design’s institutional critique should comprise issues of interdisciplinarity and argues against the view that design merely appropriates the ‘logic of transgression’ celebrated (by some) in avant-garde art (Draxler, 2006, p. 156). What is more significant, according to Draxler, is ‘the constitutive tension’ of design as ‘a compromise between commission and authorship’ (Draxler, 2006, p. 155). From this vantage point, he contends that what is needed is a re-examination of the history of design and social reform and how design’s agency is historically tied to wider social networks. The documentation of ECDC included participant responses to the cultural probes (Figure 4.4). In this ECDC challenged the conventional value attributed to the designers’ stated intention and neglect of what lay experts in design – design users for want of a better term – already know. Instead of seeking to understand the context and concerns of

FIGURE 4.4 A selection

of returned probes, including conversations between appliances, sketches an end-of-all survival kit, and an energy confession. Bill Gaver, Mike Michael, Tobie Kerridge, Liliana Ovale, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, Alex Wilkie and Jennifer Gabrys, Energy and Co-Designing Communities (ECDC) (2010–2014)

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FIGURE 4.4 (Continued)

transition communities from the perspective of design, the studio’s documentation of participants’ responses demonstrates the project’s operational critique and situated engagement with lay expert communities. This limits the emphasis on design as an expert specialisation, and expands its ascribed roles in mainstream design beyond the usual producer and consumer model. ECDC’s interdisciplinary approach that draws from Surrealism reconfigures design in unexpected ways. Confusion over the recombination of different disciplinary practices is evidenced in the studio’s accounts of user-responses to the Babble. Lay expert feedback on the

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Energy Babble ranged from expectations of ‘utilitarian pay-offs’ that would ‘directly help communities reduce energy consumption’ to more playful responses where participants gave their Babble pet-names (Gaver et al., 2015, p. 1120). Despite participant descriptions of the device as a ‘nice, funky looking thing’ and a ‘really nice object’, negative comments were also recorded, and provided insights about the reforming ambitions of transition communities (Gaver et al., 2015, p. 1121). Participants described the project as ‘annoying and noisy . . . not really for a home’, and commented that its intermittent signal ‘frightened the living crap out of me!’ (Gaver et al., 2015, p. 1121). The studio also reported only a low number of contributions to the Babble broadcast by transition community participants in the research, about thirty-five over five months. I agree with the studio’s analysis that this reticence to contribute was in part due to the political tensions between the different groups involved, with one participant claiming that he refrained from broadcasting his ‘controversial views’ as he didn’t want to ‘upset anyone’ (Gaver et al., 2015, p. 1121). However, something else was going on that I consider is related to the Babble’s challenge to the overdetermination of HCI design and some aspects of the history of social reform in design. Now aware of the noise surrounding domestic energy reduction debates, the participants resisted contributing further. One explanation for the limited contributions to the Energy Babble from lay expert participants can be found in the reflections on design users that the studio published a year after the project commenced. It defined the user as an active agent in design and ‘a key figure in design studios’ who ‘mediate[s], and [is] shaped by, multiple relations including, but not limited to: the body and the device; the social and technological; existing practices and future use; and individual preferences/requirements and collective demands’ (Wilkie and Michael, 2016, p. 34). The studio’s understanding of the agency and autonomy of the user provides nuance that authorises all behaviour by participants and design users – even resistance. In their words, ‘the user is not merely a passive representative of a social grouping waiting to “take-up” what experts and organizations produce’ (Wilkie and Michael, 2009, p. 505). In relation to Draxler’s observation of the interdisciplinarity of art and design and the need for design to reflect critically on the field’s historical agenda of social reform, the studio transposed Surrealist tactics to design and engaged participants in exploring the issues of energy reduction. Designer Liliana Ovalle emphasised the studio’s ambition to engage participants in the issues of climate change in a ‘playful and ambiguous way’ (Ovalle, 2017, p. 66). In so doing, the work is sometimes perceived as art. Gaver attributes this interpretation to several factors: the non-commercial context in which the studio operates, the absence of project briefs with ‘clearly identifiable clients’ and ‘needs’, and the affinity of their approach with ‘artistic practices’ (Gaver, 2017, p. 45). Despite contentions about the influence of art on the studio’s work, in drawing on interdisciplinarity the project satisfies the demand of Tafuri, Maldonado, Bonsiepe and van Toorn to question the institutional framework of design in relation to the political, environmental and sociocultural systems that shape it.

Conclusion: the critical operationality and undesign of ECDC This chapter has argued that ECDC satisfied the criteria of critical operativity articulated by Tafuri, the operational critique recommended by Maldonado and Bonsiepe, the operative critique of van Toorn, and undesign, defined as the production of practices and projects that articulate design in relation to the political, environmental and sociocultural systems that configure it. Through a practice-based research approach, ECDC sought to increase access to the

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intellectual means of production by involving transition communities in the research process and in the content broadcast on the Energy Babble. Broadcasting lay expert commentary on energy reduction addressed Tafuri’s recommendations for effective criticality in practice. The muddying of design with the messy everyday in ECDC also echoed a key moment in the history of operational critique and design reform at HfG Ulm. The Ulmian ambition to reconceptualise designers as agent provocateurs rather than servants of capital is the pivot on which ECDC and the Energy Babble turns. By this I mean that unlike commercial attempts to cultivate loyalty by including consumers in the means of production via customisation – such as in Nike sports-shoe decoration (1999) or the inscription of names, such as Joe or Jane, on Coca-Cola cans (2015) – ECDC invited lay experts to share information focused on reducing domestic energy consumption in the context of climate change. Although Energy Babble failed to induce transition communities to share information, it succeeded in articulating design in relation to the ideologies underpinning contemporaneous political, environmental and sociocultural systems. In so doing, it actively engaged lay experts in design and pointed to the actual scale of difficulties that shape climate change: what is required is an expanded understanding of design in the contingent and dynamic systems that shape it. Drawing on insights from art history in this analysis, I have argued that ECDC and the Energy Babble extended Surrealism’s tactical randomness and irrationality in the context of design. This entailed refuting the instrumentalisation and commodification of design processes. As Bürger’s analysis shows, the exploration of unconscious drives, purposelessness and chance, as well as the desire to contest bourgeois moral values and modern rationality, motivated Surrealism.The cultural probe for ECDC drew out unconscious desires, rather than further entrenching the convention that design is concerned only with instrumental outcomes and conscious control of given situations. By transposing these approaches to the field of design, ECDC pointed to an important barrier in changing consumer behaviours in the face of climate change: namely, the erroneous belief of designers that consumer choices are always rational. As an undesign ECDC and the Energy Babble undermines this erroneous belief and articulates design in relation to the political, environmental and sociocultural systems. In this, ECDC and the Energy Babble questioned the social pact of design as rational problemsolving, thus making new demands of design just as de Duve sees occurring at moments when art responds to social shifts. As an example of undesign ECDC drew in multiple contextual systems normally excluded from design, and included the expertise and conflicting views of design users. Furthermore, the ludic methods and probing of creative and irrational associations between disparate factors that shape energy usage implied that means-end rationality is insufficient to compel the scale of behaviour change required to avert the permanent negative impacts of climate change. Draxler’s recommendation to rethink the separation of art and design as specialisations and to re-examine the categories of art and design so that the intersections, crossovers and interdisciplinary heritage of the two fields can be re-evaluated, opens up another aspect of the undesign component of ECDC. When seen through the lens of interdisciplinarity and within the history of design and social reform, in this case that of operational critique and the socially provocative role for designers recommended by HfG Ulm and van Toorn, ECDC demonstrated the agency and self-determination that the designers ascribed to participants, even in cases of their resistance. In doing so, the project included multiple factors in domestic energy reduction and reframed it, I contend, with techniques loosely derived from Surrealist art and theory. Rather than provide a fix-it gizmo, the Babble provided a platform from which lay experts in

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transitional communities could broadcast insights about domestic energy reduction. By interspersing the broadcast with tweets, statistics and bot comments, the Babble situated energy reduction within social, economic and political contexts. As such, the Babble laid out the challenges of addressing large-scale problems in the closed system of design as it is currently defined when engaged with the complex contingency of factors contributing to climate change.

References Agrest, D., 1974. ‘Design versus non-design’, in K. Michael Hays (ed.), Architecture Theory Since 1968, New York: Columbia University, pp. 200–213. Aicher, O., 1975. ‘HfG Ulm: A concise history’, Archithese, 15, reprinted as an appendix in Heiner Jacob, 1988. ‘HfG Ulm: A personal view of an experiment in democracy and design education’, Journal of Design History, 1(3–4), pp. 231–233. Betts, P., 2004. The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bonsiepe, G., 1999. Interface: An Approach to Design, Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Akademie Department of Design. Bonsiepe, G., 2000.‘Design as tool for cognitive metabolism: From knowledge production to knowledge presentation’, paper presented at Politecnico di Milano Symposium. Available at [Accessed Feb 2017]. Boucher, A., Cameron, D., and Jarvis, N., 2012. ‘Power to the people: dynamic energy management through communal cooperation’, DIS 2012, pp. 612–20. Breton, A., 1924. ‘First surrealist Manifesto/Le Manifeste du Surréalisme’. Available at [Accessed Feb 2017]. Burdeck, Bernhard E., 2005. Design: History,Theory and Practice of Product Design, Basel: Birkhauser. Bürger, P., 1984. Theory of the Avant Garde, trans. Michael Shaw, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. de Duve, T., 1996. Clement Greenberg Between the Lines, trans. Brian Holmes, Paris: Editions Dis Voir. Draxler, H., 2006. ‘Letting loos(e): Institutional critique and design’, in A. Alberro and S. Buchman (eds.), Art After Conceptual Art, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 151–160. Dunne, A. and Raby, F., 2013. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fathers, J. and Bonsiepe, G., 2003. ‘Peripheral vision: An interview with Gui Bonsiepe charting a lifetime of commitment to design empowerment’, Design Issues, 19(4), pp. 44–56. Fezer, J., 2008. ‘Planning and democracy: An interview with Tomás Maldonado’, Texte zur Kunst, 72, pp. 109–114. Gaver, W., 2016. ‘The Environment in a larger context’, in Boucher, A., Cameron, D., Gaver, W., and S. Pennington (eds.), Datacatcher, London: Goldsmiths University of London, p. 12. Gaver, W., 2017. ‘That’s not my name’, in A. Boucher, W. Gaver, T. Kerridge, M. Michael, L. Ovalle, and A. Wilkie (eds.), Energy Babble, unpublished manuscript, pp. 44–45. Gaver, W., Beaver J., and Bedford, S., 2003. ‘Ambiguity as a resource for design’, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 5(1), pp. 233–240. Gaver, W., Boucher, A., Pennington, S., and Walker, B., 2004. ‘Cultural probes and the value of uncertainty’, Interactions, Sept, pp. 53–56. Gaver,W., Bowers, J., Boehner, K., Boucher, A., Cameron, D., Hauenstein, M., Jarvis, N., and Pennington, S., 2013. ‘Indoor Weather Stations: Investigating a ludic approach to environmental HCI through batch prototyping’, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘13), New York, ACM, pp. 3451–3460. Gaver, W., Dunne, T., and Pacenti, E., 1999. ‘Cultural probes’, Interactions, Jan–Feb, pp. 21–29. Gaver, W., Michael, M., Gabrys, J., Wilkie, A., Kerridge, T., and Ovalle, L., 2011. Local Governance Energy Workshop, Oxford, Poster, Oct.

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Gaver, W., Michael, M., Kerridge, T., Wilkie, A., Boucher, A., Ovalle, L., and Plummer-Fernandez, M., 2015. ‘Energy babble: Mixing environmentally-oriented internet content to engage community groups’, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2015), Seoul, Republic of South Korea, Apr 18–23, pp. 1115–1124. Jameson, F., 1985/88. The Ideologies of Theory: The Syntax of History, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Koskinen, I., Zimmerman, J., Binder, T., Redstrom, J., and Wensveen, S., 2011. Design Research Through Practice: From the Lab, Field, and Showroom, Waltham: Elsevier. Leach, A., 2002. ‘ “Everything we do is but the larvae of our intentions”: Manfredo Tafuri and Storia Dell’Architettura Italiana, 1944–1985’, in Additions to Architectural History: XIXth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, Brisbane, SAHANZ, pp. 1–12. Leach, A., 2005. ‘Choosing history: Tafuri, criticality and the limits of architecture’, The Journal of Architecture, 10(3), pp. 235–244. McNamara, A., 2012. ‘Six rules for practice-led research’, Text: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, (14), pp. 1–15. Michael, M., 2012. ‘What are we busy doing? Engaging the idiot’, Science, Technology and Human Values, 37(5), pp. 528–554. Michael, M., 2017. ‘The stuff of method: Open things and closed objects’, in A. Boucher, W. Gaver, T. Kerridge, M. Michael, L. Ovalle, and A. Wilkie (eds.), in Energy Babble, unpublished manuscript, pp. 138–145. Ovalle, L., 2017. ‘Shaping the Energy Babble’, in A. Boucher, W. Gaver, T. Kerridge, M. Michael, L. Ovalle, and A. Wilkie (eds.), in Energy Babble, unpublished manuscript, pp. 66–71. Spitz, R., 2002. HfG Ulm:The View Behind the Foreground, Stuttgart and London: Edition Axel Menges. Tafuri, M., 1974. ‘L’Architecture dans le boudoir: The language of criticism and the criticism of language’, in K. Michael Hays (ed.), Architecture Theory Since 1968, New York: Columbia University, pp. 148–173. Tafuri, M., 1980. Theories and History of Architecture, London: Granada. van Toorn, J., 1994. ‘Design and reflexivity’, Visible Language, 28(4), pp. 317–25. van Toorn, J., 2010. ‘A passion for the real’, Design Issues, 26(4), pp. 45–56. Wilkie, A., 2017. ‘Studios, problems, publics’, in A. Boucher,W. Gaver,T. Kerridge, M. Michael, L. Ovalle, and A. Wilkie (eds.), Energy Babble, unpublished manuscript, pp. 88–94. Wilkie, A. and Michael, M., 2009. ‘Expectation and mobilisation: Enacting future users’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 34(4), pp. 502–522. Wilkie, A. and Michael, M., 2016. ‘The design studio as a centre of synthesis’, in I. Farías and A. Wilkie (eds.), Studio Studies: Operations, Topologies & Displacements, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 25–39. Available at http://research.gold.ac.uk/14629/ [Accessed Feb 2017].

5 A STATEMENT FOR ATTENDING TO DIVERSE ECONOMIES THROUGH DESIGN RESEARCH Carl DiSalvo

Across the fields of design there is an undercurrent of thought and desire that design might be different, in particular, that design might take on new purposes, making more substantive contributions to social change. One challenge with fulfilling this desire is that design is often constrained by a limited notion of the economy. In this chapter, I present three models of design research. Through each, I attempt to sketch ways of thinking and doing design outside of the common paradigms of professional design practice. When advancing alternatives such as social design or transition design (or perhaps “undesign”), there is no shortage of critiques of professional design practice. My specific concern is with how we think about the relationship of design to the economy. So, I offer in abbreviated form, a few ways of doing design research differently, such that design research might be a site for discovering, inventing, and above all, experimenting with different conceptualizations of the relationship between design and the economy. Before proceeding, it is fair to ask, why do we need new conceptualizations of design? Overwhelmingly, professional design practice uncritically embraces notions of free-market capitalism and finds its value in providing service to “business” or “the economy.” This is evident throughout popular design journalism, design awards, and the professional organizations of design. This embrace obligates and unduly limits design to free-market ideologies and forces. The argument of this essay is not, necessarily, an argument against notions of a market economy. It is an argument against a reductive notion of the economy. There is nothing fundamental or essential about the common models of the economy that pervade design discourse – other economies are possible. Beyond simplistic versions of Western capitalism, there could in fact be an exciting and robust field of design research inquiry oriented toward broader notions of the economy. The work of J.K. Gibson-Graham, for instance, provides worlds of possibilities for diverse economies (1996, 2006, 2008). These include cooperatives, informal lending, self-provisioning, non-capitalist firms, even illegal activity. In and across all of these contexts and practices there are exchanges, matters of value, and labor. There is also a fair amount of research into alternative economies – it is not as if they are unknown contexts and practices, there is simply minimal attention given to them in design. Indeed, within the fields of economics and management, sociology, geography

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anthropology, etc., there is enough work on various alternative economies to debate them (e.g., Samers 2005). Constraining design, either implicitly or explicitly, to commonplace market ideologies and forces is a problem on at least three registers. First, it limits the topics of inquiry to matters of concern for the mainstream market and the actors that comprise it. Certainly, many of those issues are significant, but they are not all the issues that might be of concern. Second, it limits knowledge production to those approaches that can travel and accrue value through the network of actors that comprise the mainstream market. That is to say, if the value of design is (in any substantive way) measured by the extent to which it provides service to mainstream market actors – to the extent to which it effects that market – then modes of inquiry, knowing, and sharing will be oriented toward modes that have the greatest traction within those contexts. Third, limiting design to commonplace market ideologies and forces restrains the intellectual and practical development of design – it limits what we conceive of as the range of professional design practice and how it is done. While we often think of design research as a method for innovating products or services, we can also pursue design research as site for reflexively interrogating design itself. What I am suggesting is that design research can work to elucidate new conceptualizations of design, particularly with regard to diverse economies, that might allow us to think and do design differently. Rather than considering any one model of design research in depth, in what follows are three models, each treated superficially. The discussion of each of these models of design research teases outs alternatives drives and commitments, as a partial introduction toward reconsidering design research as a site for reconceptualizing design practice.

Basic design research In his essay “Design Research and the New Learning” Richard Buchanan calls attention to three modes of design research: clinical, applied, and basic (2001).This is a common formulation and there should be nothing controversial in Buchanan’s claim that clinical and applied are the predominate modes of design research, and that basic design research is rare. After all, the overwhelming majority of design research is conducted to address specific contexts of use, In contrast, basic design research is concerned with “fundamental problems in understanding the principles – and sometimes the first principles – which govern and explain phenomena” (2001, 18). Basic design research, then, investigates the foundations of design, writ large. This includes practices of designing, designed things, and the use of things designed. It also includes the circumstances, assumptions, and values of design – indeed these topics and their associated themes might comprise much more of basic design research than the particulars of design practice or things. The purpose of such inquiry is not to affirm design or to improve design. The purpose of such inquiry is to question, to contest, to judge, to elucidate, to produce interpretations and articulations that broaden our understanding of what design is and could be, of how design works or does not work, of the relations of design to other fields and practices. There are, in fact, outstanding examples of basic design research, including the work of Buchanan, Stolterman & Nelson, Fry, Maze, Redstrom, Kimbell, and Clarke (among many others included in this volume), which range across methodologies of rhetoric, philosophy, social & political theory, and history. When such design research occurs, it is often under the auspices of “Design Studies” or sometimes “Design Theory.” Producing theory, that is, developing informed and imaginative conjectures about the principles and foundations of design, is

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crucial. Theorizing is an inventive way of analytically describing and judging the foundations of design.Theorizing is also a way to deliberate about modes of design beyond its foundations. Put another way, basic design research is an endeavor to think, both critically and appreciatively, the cultures of design. The economy or rather economies are foundational to design. One of the multiple histories of design is that the profession was born of industry, in the advent of the industrial revolution. As such, questioning the economy and the possible relationships between design and the economy should be an essential theme of basic design research.We should not assume that the optional circumstances for design are free-market capitalism. We should probe how design has, and continues to work in other economic and socio-economic conditions. We should consider the political economy of design itself.Through such endeavors, basic research can contribute new perspectives on the relationship between design and industry, commerce, and exchange by offering interpretations of a pluralism of economic theories with regard to design (see Franz and Elzenbaumer, 2016).

Engaged design scholarship The phrase “engaged scholarship” can be used as shorthand to encapsulate a range of research practices that include direct involvement in issues. In some cases, this is limited to notions of service learning or participatory action research, but a more generous interpretation would include any form of scholarship that includes a commitment to some notion of social change. Engaged design scholarship is similar to clinical research in that it often focuses on an instance of an issue. But it is the differences in context that are meaningful – engaged design scholarship is situational and directed by the consequences of an issue and the attempt to address those consequences in situ. This often means working in and with communities and organizations of all kinds (of interest, of practice, geographic, of identity). While the purpose of the research is to address the issue, this may or may not involve “solving” the issue; it could just as well involve mitigating consequences or other forms of care. Engaged scholarship offers a model of design research in which enough of the familiar tropes, roles, and activities of design and designing continue so as to make the research tractable. The work of engaged design scholarship often looks like, in material and form, the work of professional design practice. At the same time, there is also enough difference in terms of values and commitments that those tropes, roles, and activities do not simply reproduce traditional associations and dependencies but develop new relations. The appeals of an argument are to the character and affect of the community, the obligations are to the logic of the problematic situation. Significantly, an engaged design researcher is generative of not just solutions or care or means of address, engaged design research is also generative of new forms (techniques, arrangements, principles) of design practice. This mode of design research closely aligns with participatory design, melding the traditions of participatory design with the work of advocacy. In engaged design research we take part in diverse economies. Our knowledge moves beyond theory and into practice. However, it’s not a practice led by design, it is a practice in which design follows, learning along the way. Through engaged design scholarship we participate in cooperatives, informal lending, self-provisioning, non-capitalist firms, perhaps even illegal activity. Through this participation we are able to experiment with the different logics of diverse economies, and in that process, experiment with reconfiguring the roles and responsibilities of design.

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Designerly ways of knowing The phrase “designerly ways of knowing” is awkward, and yet it does express the notion that design is a particular mode of constructing knowledge. This is an important assertion because it places design alongside other epistemologies; for example, we might talk of anthropological or sociological ways of knowing, or we might talk broadly of scientific ways of knowing or more specifically of biological ways of knowing.The claim that designing is a discreet genre of developing meaning is significant for positioning design as research endeavor. One issue, then, is what is or might be the subject of designerly ways of knowing, about what are we creating meaning through design research? In the canonical The Science of the Artificial, Herbert Simon sets the groundwork for design research by not simply informing us about designing, but rather, about design research as a mode of informing us about the world: “One can envision a future, however, in which our main interest in both science and design will lie in what they teach us about the world and not what they allow us to do to the world.” (1998, 164) This idea has been echoed and expounded upon by Clive Dilnot in his discussion of the significance of Simon and the conceptualization of the artificial (Fry, Dilnot, and Stewart, 2015). To paraphrase Dilnot, if the condition of the world is the artificial, and the concern of design is the making of the artificial, then one way to understand the world is through design. This is a break from both basic design research and engaged design scholarship, which tends to be about the foundations of design or the situations of design, to instead being a mode of inquiry into the very conditions of the contemporary. This idea of designing as a particular mode of knowledge production is not limited to the fields of design research. It also permeates the humanities and social sciences, particularly in the varieties of the Digital Humanities and so-called inventive methods in Science and Technology Studies (Lury and Wakeford, 2012). Designing as research becomes a way of understanding how the artificial (i.e., designed things) works in the construction and maintenance of lives and life itself. Herein, the boundaries of design are pushed even further still, not tethered to the professions of design (industrial, graphic, service) but open to and embracing off all of the procedures and habits, all of the praxes of making the artificial. Design research, in this conceptualization, becomes another way of knowing the human condition on par with other ways of knowing, not to mistakenly cast as social science but nonetheless acknowledged as a deeply humanistic endeavor – a way to know ourselves in the context of the contemporary. From this perspective, we come to understand diverse economies by working to design them. The endeavor of design research is to explore systematically how, through design, our economies might be differently structured and experienced. Rather than considering freemarket capitalism, or any economic model as a given, all economies, all modes of exchange, value, and labor are open to experimentation through making – the question then becomes not What is design?, but rather, What might an economy be by design?

So. . . Each of these descriptions of modes of research is woefully incomplete, and certainly these three are not exhaustive of the possibilities. The point, however, is not to detail a particular research project but rather to make an argument for a pluralistic approach to design research that attempts to discover, invent, and, experiment with the possible relationships between

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design and the economy. This is not necessary an anti-market position. Rather, it is an assertion that there is more to design than the mainstream market and that the potential of design should not be limited to serving the market as we commonly conceptualize it. Instead, part of the potential of design can be to explore and further alternative conceptualizations of the market and diverse economies. In addition, basic design research, engaged design scholarship, and designerly ways of knowing enables us to reinvent the practice of design itself – to invent diverse practices of design. For instance, basic design research allows us to question and contest the fundamentals of design and reimagine design practice in new conditions. Engaged design scholarship allows us to experiment with different configurations of designing, such as different relations between designer, client, user, public, artifact, etc. In addition, designerly ways of knowing opens up the practice of design to being a practice oriented not merely toward action, but as much toward understanding, how such an orientation would effect the practice of design is open to discovery. If design is, or at least has been, about invention, then one charge of design research should be not simply to invent better, but also to invent anew, to inquire into and devise new subject and subjectivities of design. So much talk, writing, work, has been and continues to be put toward expanding design and legitimizing design research. However, so much of those efforts, implicitly or explicitly, maintain alignments with reductive notions of the economy, which in turn, limits design. It is difficult to invent anew from within, particularly when aspects of invention often work against established histories and structures. To entertain and pursue a line of thinking and doing design that engages, and perhaps contributes to diverse economies is a risky endeavor because design is so wedded to free-market capitalism. Nevertheless, other economies are possible, and so are other futures of design.

References Buchanan, Richard. “Design Research and the New Learning.” Design Issues 17.4 (2001): 3–23. Franz, Fabio, and Elzenbaumer. “Bianca: Commons & Community Economies: Entry Points to Design for Eco-Social Justice?” In Proceedings of DRS 2016, Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference. Brighton, 27–30 June 2016. Fry, Tony, Clive Dilnot, and Susan Stewart. Design and the Question of History. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. Gibson-Graham, Julie Katherine. The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy:With a New Introduction. University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Gibson-Graham, Julie Katherine. A Postcapitalist Politics. Univesity of Minnesota Press, 2006. Gibson-Graham, Julie-Katherine. “Diverse Economies: Performative Practices for Other Worlds’.” Progress in Human Geography 32.5 (2008): 613–632. Lury, Celia, and Nina Wakeford, eds. Inventive Methods:The Happening of the Social. Routledge, 2012. Samers, Michael.“The Myopia of ”Diverse Economies, ara Critique of the ‘Informal Economy.’ Antipode 37.5 (2005): 875–886. erine. A Postcapitalist Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Simon, Herbert A. The Sciences of the Artificial. MIT press, 1998.

6 ‘I PREFER NOT TO’ Anti-progressive designing Cameron Tonkinwise

Destructive preferences When Herbert Simon defined design – in order to point out that engineers did not have a monopoly over design – as what anybody does when they try change existing situations into preferred ones (1996, p. 111), his choice of terminology reflected that he was an economist thinking about emerging powers of computation. Economics is the dismal science of preferences, of how people choosing one thing over another lies at the basis of the systems by which we organize the distribution of resources. Preferring a product seems like a mild mannered everyday activity. If I choose this one, that leaves the other for you to choose – no harm done, unless you wanted what I chose. However, if I keep choosing this one, and you choose not to make do with your second choice, over time ‘they’ will stop producing the second one. My and your preferences will have had an impact on the stock of things in the world. The economic systems, increasingly backed by computational technology throughout Simon’s lifespan, that are the aggregate effect of our preferences, in fact determine over time what gets made and what conversely gets no longer made, perhaps even un-made, or destroyed. Design, in Simon’s broader sense of preferring, is in the end a matter of life and death, at least for artifacts. Designers make futures. They make the things that will make up the future. When they choose one version of something over another, the one that is not materialized never even makes it into a state that would be available for other people to choose. As an idea, especially if documented, the less preferred option could be materialized by a designer later, but other non-designers only get to make use of the one that made it. If the designer succeeds in making something that not only he or she prefers, but proves more preferable to users, or at least consumers, then existing versions of that thing, or the things that were previously used to accomplish the kinds of tasks that the newly designed thing accomplishes more effectively, will become redundant. While still in existence, and so available for use, they will tend not to be used, since a ‘better’ one now exists, and so will fall into disrepair and/or will need to be cleared away. In this way, the creative act of designing

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is inherently destructive. Designers do not change existing situations into preferred ones; they destroy what currently exits by replacing it with a preferable one. Designers rarely take responsibility for the end-lives of what they do design (i.e., making things disassemble for component and material recovery, and designing the reverse logistics to get products back from customers for that disassembly). However, designers almost never take responsibility for the waste they make when their new design replaces old, probably still functional, ones. It would slow innovation down if designers had to take into account the disposal of an existing situation when evaluating preference for a new situation. Because designers are not required to take responsibility for the waste they turn existing products into when making preferable replacements, things pile up – the previous two or three versions of every thing in the household collect in landfills after dwelling for a while in wardrobes, garages, attics and basements.

Clearing the design way This undesigning that any design does (even new product categories must involve new practices that take time away from activities involving other existing products) is not only physical, but also ideational, that is to say, part of the design process itself. When a designer receives a brief to design a new kind of X, the designer must find a way of freeing her or himself from existing notions of X, and in particular from any sense that current instances of X are adequate. Designers often begin the process of designing by critiquing precedents of what they have been asked to design. If asked to design a chair, a designer might start by critically examining a series of past and present iconic chairs appropriate for the new design’s context. As Jan Michl has succinctly noted (2002), all design is redesign. While instructive of what a new chair might seek to accomplish, these critiques also serve to undermine the value of existing designs, justifying their replacement by something better. If designers do not start with this act of ideational destruction, they may instead try to approach the design from ‘first principles,’ determining the nature of the problem that any particular instance of X claims to respond to. In this case, the designer is effectively ‘destroying’ every existing version of X in order to justify ‘starting again.’ Without this clearing, the designer may struggle to validate why there is any need to produce yet another X at all. There has to be the sense that current Xs, despite existing, are not in fact perfect, so there is room for preferring new Xs that surpass the performances and qualities of those existing ones. This is the arrogance of design, an optimism that is nevertheless a kind of permanent dissatisfaction, the persistent, even insistent, sense that things as they currently are, are not what people should consider preferable. Jan Michl is again insightful on this (1991): design seems motivated by ‘the rumour of functional perfection.’ This commitment to perfectibility is what perhaps distinguishes designers from most other people. Non-designers tend to suffer from confirmation biases and endowment effects that over-valorize what currently exists, discounting the possibility of betterment. ‘If someone could have, they would have, so they probably can’t.’ This means that designers cannot assume that everybody thinks that every thing could and so should be improved. Designers consequently must come up with things that are considerably more preferable than what currently exists merely because their design will be compared to what does already exist and so is considered, by most non-designers, to be more or less satisfactory.

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Making room This inertia toward what currently exists is not only an effect of social psychology. It is the result of the fact that no artifact is ‘an island;’ each is only ever a node in an ecosystem. A device must be plugged into infrastructures and most likely has peripherals or other associated equipment for adequate use, and even more ancillary gear for specialized use or maintenance. Each product functions or makes sense only when in particular kinds of places characterized by related collections of artifacts. A toaster in a living room is out-of-place and perhaps a fire hazard. A lounge-chair in a schoolroom is (or was) inappropriate, as is a bicycle on a train, unless the latter is designed for it. This means that a whole set of other artifacts contextualize what counts as preferable. Any new toaster will need to work with existing infrastructures and kitchens. Only on very special occasions will the innovativeness of a new version of a product – a radically redesigned form of toaster perhaps – result in such increased preferability that it justifies changing everything else in its designated locale – such as rewiring the kitchen with a new power supply. At the moment, many think electric cars are preferable to an extent sufficient to warrant installing new power supplies into their garages, as well as beginning to replace petrol stations with charging centers. In these cases, a disruptive innovation will have destroyed an entire ecosystem rather than just displaced one component. The wider sets of artifacts that maintain the preferability of an existing design also entail the walls and streets that infrastructures servicing certain devices must run through. Buildings and even cities may need to be destroyed to make way for preferable devices if those devices require access to different kinds of resources. For a couple of decades, developed economy cities drilled holes into all their existing buildings, turning them into ‘Swiss cheese’ as Vilém Flusser once noted (1999, p. 81), to make way for telecommunications prior to wifi. By contrast, for almost a century, the lack of space for plumbing individual laundries into dense buildings has fated New Yorkers to use laundromats.

Expecting destructive practices What resists new designs are not just existing versions and their associated product ecologies, built environments and infrastructures, but also all the skills and habits associated with using those existing versions. Users invest in learning to use everyday tools and devices to the point of making them routinized aspects of their everyday lives (see Ilmonen 2004). The preferability of a new design must overcome the costs (more in effort and time than finances in most cases) involved in learning a new set of interactions and a new set of routines for any new product. This again is not merely an additive process – invariably some unlearning is also required. Existing interaction habits must be broken.With each new update to an app, habituated ways of doing things must be destroyed and replaced by the new ones. If users are prepared to unlearn and relearn modes of interaction, it is mostly because the latter are, in the end, easier and more convenient, and hopefully more effective and pleasurable. As a result, these changes function like ratchets – it is almost impossible to reverse them, to make people return to what is more difficult or inconvenient, or less effective and pleasurable. The history of air conditioning for instance has been the step-wise process of people experiencing coolth in a cinema and so coming to expect it of their home (Cooper 2002). Once someone has experienced the ability to call for an indentured driver at the push of an

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Uber button, they apparently now desire an Uber for chefs and cleaners and doctors, etc. – destroying the idea that some effort is required to complete daily chores. For something to be easier, it requires, in the end, less skill. In this way, device innovations can ratchet users away from skilled forms of interaction. Technology critics from the beginning of Western philosophy have complained of the deskilling that flows from the adoption of new technologies: writing destroys remembering, television destroys reading, hand-held screens destroy sociality, etc (Borgmann 2009, Braverman 1998). Just as products are not islands, skills also do not occur in isolation. They are part of social practices that take place within particular product ecologies that constitute their own ‘timespaces,’ to use Theodore Schatzki’s term (2010). Modifying aspects of those practices can alter their pace and rhythm, which will in turn disturb adjacent practices (Shove et al. 2012). Modifying how one engages with news for instance can affect breakfasting and commuting, or vice versa. In this way, what can get destroyed when innovating new products and their associated practices will not only be the skills directly associated with that product-practice, but indirectly other practices.This was the argument made about the microwave oven (see for instance the use of this example in Verbeek & Kockelkoren 1998). Not only was this product disruptive of what people ate and how it was prepared, but it also disrupted when people ate and consequently whom they ate with. In this way, microwaves made possible longer work hours and so the missing of the family meal, perhaps increasing the chances of family breakdown. The qualities of any practice are not only material or bodily performed; they are also concern the wider purpose of that practice. Showering involves systems of water heating and pressure, and skills in shampoo use and hair drying; but it also has overall cultural expectations, something like a combination of efficiency, pleasure and hygiene. Existing shower devices or practices may start to seem less preferable if it takes a long time to wait for the hot water to come through, or if the shower head produces less invigorating jet of water. People have expectations of the products and infrastructures that are particular to each practice. I may tolerate much less efficiency in my food preparation than I expect from my internet access. Radical innovations often require expectation management (Borup et al. 2006). In order to enhance preferability, marketers claim that each innovation allows customers to raise their expectations of effectivity or pleasure. However, new categories of product-practices might involve wholly different sets of expectations. A dating app might initially seem to make finding love more efficient when it is in fact enabling different kinds of engagements, ones that in fact allow you to lower your expectations of love. Many people insist that sharing economy platforms are more effective ways to create trust, whereas it is more likely that they are allowing new kinds of economic interactions between peers outside of formal firms that make trust redundant as a factor. Whether expectations are being ratcheted up or just transformed, current senses of what a certain ensemble of infrastructures and products can deliver through a practice can be destroyed to make way for new ones. Shifting from a car-based commute to cycling requires changing your expectations about travel time and arrival state; cyclists need to expect to have to change clothes, but they also expect to get improved health from how they get to work.

Destruction denialism So designers, who think of themselves as creators, in fact are, and must be, in many different ways destroyers: destroyers of existing products and even whole product ecologies; and destroyers of existing patterns of everyday life and expectations associated with those habits

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and systems. According to Simon’s definition of design with which we began, all these things that get removed from our societies are, we must remember, the less preferable. Their removal is apparently worth what they make room for. Simon is probably more famous for his notion of ‘bounded rationality,’ the idea that we, or especially expert professionals, delimit and reframe problem-spaces in order to allow calculation of best-fit solutions. By considering only what we are creating rather than what possible futures we might be destroying, Simon suggests that it becomes necessary to repress thought of more complex, longer-term futures when trying to decide on what to design for the near future: Beyond that circle [of concern for our grandchildren] our concern is more curious and intellectual than emotional. We even find it difficult to define which distant events are the triumphs and which the catastrophes, who the heroes and who the villains. Thus the events and prospective events that enter into our value systems are all dated, and the importance we attach to them generally drops off sharply with their distance in time. For the creatures of bounded rationality that we are, this is fortunate. If our decisions depended equally upon their remote and their proximate consequences, we could never act but would forever by lost in thought. By applying a heavy discount factor to events, attenuating them with their remoteness in time and space, we reduce our problems of choice to a size commensurate with our limited computing capabilities. (Simon 1996, p. 157) Designers, to determine, or convince themselves about, the value of what they are designing, must, it seems, discount, externalize or ignore not just what they might be destroying, and so taking from the future, but also the very fact that irreversible destruction might be entailed by any designing. Designers must destroy to create the preferable, sometimes explicitly in relation to precedents; but they also tend to, or perhaps have to, destroy any strong sense of what their designs will destroy in order to maintain belief in the value of what they are designing. Designers who pay too much attention to all the destruction involved in their profession – sustainable designers for example – often complain of feeling debilitated. Better to ignore that you are a destroyer and instead focus your brand on being a creator. Given the extent to which our societies are mired in unsustainable products, infrastructure, practices and expectations, however, certain forms of large-scale destruction do seem necessary (Tonkinwise 2014). In this situation, getting designers to acknowledge the necessarily destructive parts of their creative practice should not be a burden to repress, but rather a license, liberating designers to take responsibility for their destructive powers and direct them against ways of living and working that are themselves destroying our societies’ long-term viability. How to undertake carefully targeted comprehensive acts of destruction by design?

Nothing worth doing is easy Currently pervasive discourses do seem to promote more destructive acts of design, though always ambiguously. Consider that, at the moment, the Global Consumer Class seems bewitched by ideas of sudden change. Preferability in innovative products and services preferably comes in the form of violent ‘disruption.’ Things that seem adequate one day should feel like useless relics of the past the next when a brilliant newly designed product service

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system bursts on the market. We, in the global consumer class, seem to have been conditioned to not only expect this, but also even desire it. Our formal and workplace education is apparently making us simultaneously resilient to change and agilely adaptive to its inevitability. Nevertheless, this scale of destruction, even when desired, is difficult. Most of what is marketed as disruptive seems, in a relatively short time, to fit with existing infrastructures, lifestyles and incumbent business models. Innovations that declare themselves to be radical breakthroughs seem in the end to destroy very little. While this is primarily the result of the vested interests of those investing in profitable returns from these disruptions, it is also because destroying everyday things, to which we are each expectantly habituated, is not easy. How then to more carefully and comprehensively direct the destructive aspects that are central to the power of design? Designers who want to take responsibility for the destructive side to their practice, and apply it at a larger-scale against unsustainable systems, can take advantage of other destructive events (see the special issue of Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, Van den Bergh 2013). A natural disaster for instance may actually destroy existing built environments. A financial crisis may require communities to relinquish ownership of some or all of their goods. At these moments, people are forced to experience very different kinds of existences. Expectations associated with existing infrastructures mediated through everyday devices can no longer be sustained. Routine practices become impossible, forcing exposure to other possibilities. What people must deal with in those situations is clearly far from preferable; one does not wish these disasters on anyone. But in the diminishing number of places where a social safety net still exists for such ‘disasters,’ these moments of unexpected, external, yet not total destruction create opportunities for the preferable to be trialled. People might be more open to lifestyles with fewer possessions, less electronic devices perhaps; or they may come to see the value of more diverse communities and tolerating dependence upon, perhaps even working to actively sustain, commons-based resources. These events need not be large-scale or permanent: extended blackouts during extreme weather events open people to desirability of shifts in their built environments. In consumer theory, the less drastic version of these events is referred to as ‘innovation junctions.’ (De Wit et al. 2002; see also Cowan 1987) These can be significant life-stage events that require reorganizing everyday life: leaving home to go to university; geographic relocations as a result of a job, or a relationship; a religious conversion; a death or divorce; a lifestyle impacting illness or accident, etc. Market data analysts are desperate to identify these moments in people’s lives as early as possible, if not to predict them, because within current consumer systems, they are moments when a slew of new purchases must be made: think of the re-equipping associated with starting to have children (and the ‘destruction’ of (sporting) equipment associated with the time-consuming leisure activities of the soon to be, no-longerchildless adult). These occasional moments of household restructuring should be sites of intervention by the designer intent on being productively destructive.There should be a range of ready-to-try experiments in different ways of living – living labs (Scott et al. 2012) – specific to any of the more common ‘innovation junctions’: trying car-free living in the city of a new job before settling on a new home; enhancing the experience of cohousing at university so that graduates can continue the experience; receiving information about ways of breaking bad dietary habits along with information about a chronic condition diagnosis, etc.

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Critical (i.e., crisis-causing) design If events that afford destructive restructuring of everyday life, whether larger-scale and external natural or financial disasters, or those that are part of life-stages transitions, are too infrequent to enable the amount of change our societies need to become more sustainable, then responsibility falls to the designer to try to foster such moments. The task of the designer is not merely to look for innovation junctions but to create their conditions of possibility. This means moving critique from a process that is internal to designing, after receiving a problem context from a project sponsor, for example, to something that is external to and prior to designing (Pel et al. 2016; Avelino 2017). To reconfigure design in this way, designers must be public intellectuals (Tonkinwise 2016), who creatively but forcefully criticize existing products and systems as well as the practices enabled by them. Design education does not equip designers well for this role. Designers at best are taught how to present and perhaps defend their own ideas, but almost never how to conduct critique of others, especially in media ecologies outside of the studio. In many professional contexts, there seems to be some kind of code among designers against publicly criticizing the work of other designers. The defense of this proscription is often that ‘you cannot know the client-context that constrained that outcome’ – though this is exactly what should be ‘outed’ by critical debate around a design, so that judgments about responsibility can be made, and actions taken with respect to future projects. Fomenting moments of crisis that make possible processes of destructive restructuring does not only involve argumentative criticism. Producing and circulating design propositions, especially if explicitly designed to stretch current notions of what is possible, can themselves solicit critical discourses. This was recognized at the very birth of modern industrial design with Raymond Loewy’s Most Advanced Yet Acceptable doctrine which extolled designers to produce explicitly radical designs ‘on spec’ in order to extend what clients would consider a safer yet still innovative design. The more recent version of this doctrine is ‘Speculative Critical Design.’ These idiotic propositions (in Isabelle Stengers’ sense – see Michael 2012) use the plausibility of designed artifacts to try to ‘assemble political publics.’ (Marres 2016) They gather people, it is claimed, because of their ambiguity. Current products and systems have the endowment-effect of being already existing shaken when these alternatives are materialized by Speculative Designers, even if not in viable-to-diffuse ways. Transition Management theorists are now appropriating a similar rhetoric of deconstruction to describe these ambivalence-generating events. (Walker & Shove 2007) Being critical, whether in the explicit sense of verbal argumentation, or in the performative sense of speculative design, is not only something required in order to open up practices to destructive restructuring. It is also something needed throughout designing, and after. There is a survivalist drive to what currently exists – partly due to the network effects discussed above – which means that destruction will be resisted by the status quo. Innovation junctions therefore need to be defended, and held open. To defend design interventions that will displace current products and systems, designers and their allies need to maintain their criticality. This means that even after designing alternatives, designers must try to prevent reappropriation by aspects of current systems that remain in place. Sharing economy value propositions need to be structured into service provider owned cooperatives for instance, so that they do not get reappropriated by private equity and converted into transaction skimming exploitative Gig economies. (Scholz & Schneider 2016)

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De-progressing Much of what needs destroying are current modes of living and working that are dominating what will come to be the future, thereby destroying our chance at more sustainable futures. These defuturing lifestyles and their artifacts (Fry 2009), infrastructures, practices and expectations, appear to us as ‘modern,’ ‘progressive,’ and ‘future-oriented.’ These characterizations make them difficult to criticize, and cast actions that seek to destroy them as extremist. In addition to wanting to displace those ways of being that might be destructive of our sustainability, we need to displace the belief that ‘there is no alternative’ (Margaret Thatcher’s famous neoliberalist slogan). These lifestyles are hegemonically entrenched by manifesting as the most (technologically) advanced ways of being. Their slickly designed currency moves them from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought,’ from what just happens to be the current manifestation of unsustainable capitalism to the best of all possible manifestations of techno-scientifically supported freedom. To free ourselves of these currently dominating ways of organizing our society, we have to destroy the perception of them as the latest and the best. This means that the change affected by acts of creatively destructive design cannot in turn be cast as ‘progress.’ To do so might succeed in displacing the present with something more preferable. Yet, the governing ideal of progress will not have been destroyed. Rather it will persist, in turn entrenching in place a designed short-term future, just as it made the present resistant to structural change. Designers need to find a way to pursue the destructively preferable without casting the resulting change as progress: what is preferable are futures that no longer appear to be mere advancements of what currently exists. How is it possible to deny progress, or to prefer what does not feel like progress? The simplest response to this paradox is to find aspects of past ways of living and working preferable; in other words, directly destroy idea(l)s of progress by reversing apparent developments and seeking to make things return to previous styles of product ecosystems, practices and expectations. Trying to recover lifestyles that have been destroyed by currently dominant individualistic consumerism or technologically advanced economies is itself an act of destruction of those ‘innovations’ that displaced them. The practices of Slow Food for instance aim to destroy the unsustainability of the Fast Food Industry by recovering local communities and crafts of food production. Walking buses, which arrange for groups of children to walk together to schools, also begin to destroy the over-expectations of safety that drive sales of 4WD vehicles. Something as simple as choosing a manual push-mower undermines not only the sale of polluting two-stroke lawn mowers, but also the suburban idea of large swathes of fertilized and pesticided lawn – because you tend to want less lawn, needing less frequent mowing, if you are the one who has to push the mower around (Fry 1992). Critics of sustainability often recognize this with their alarmist assertions: ‘do you want to destroy all the progress that capitalism-derived civilization has delivered by returning to less convenient social systems?’ (Nordhaus & Shellenberger 2007) On the one hand, the answer is yes; what appears civilized is in fact unsustainable and destroying it is preferable, because doing so does not necessarily entail things getting worse. Obviously, the argument here is not to insist upon what is not preferable. On the other hand, de-progressive design does not mean returning to how things were. It is first, not the entire lifeworld of a past that designers might seek to restore, only the more sustainable aspects. Second, the process of redesigning aspects of the past to re-take the place of the present that displaced them would entail reconfiguring those pasts; they would not

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arrive in the same form as they were previously. Third, in most cases, what is being restored never entirely disappeared. It is the myth of progress that it happens evenly: if the future is already present in a dispersed manner as William Gibson is often quoted as saying, that is because the past persists in various ways and places. I must now admit that this third point somewhat contradicts all that I have been arguing up this point. When a new design is taken up, it may not mean its complete destruction, just its marginalization. Products, practices and their associated expectations can remain the preferences of non-mainstream groups, or for only occasional avocational activities. Though destroyed as principal ways of organizing everyday living and working, they still exist as remnants that could be redesigned into preferability. This is precisely the argument Elizabeth Shove makes when thinking through the relation between destruction and transitions to preferable futures in her article ‘The Shadowy Side of Innovation: Unmaking and Sustainability’ (2012). Shove notes that as cities evolved, cars displaced cycling, destroying infrastructures and skills associated with the latter, but not entirely; cycling instead migrated into a leisure activity. The task of transitioning to more sustainable transport systems can therefore involve not disruptive technological innovation, but instead situations of revival and reinvention . . . in which relevant forms of materiality and know-how already exist. Accordingly the challenge is one of rescuing, remembering and perhaps adapting but not generating competence from scratch. In such cases, relevant cohorts of lead users might turn out to be those who are least experimental in orientation, and who are in fact laggards doggedly clinging to old ways. (p. 373) Shove notes that such creative acts of recovery will still involve destructive tactics: If lower carbon ways of life depend on reinstating arrangements that have been displaced by new more resource intensive forms, a further strategy is to deliberately dislodge these incoming regimes. . . . This might mean directly attacking systems of automobility, or figuring out how to unmake suburbia and suburban ways of life as a means of reinstating the bike. (p. 373)

Destroying what does not actually exist Taking responsibility for the destroying that designing does can therefore involve seeking to undestroy. To do so is an act of world disclosure (Spinosa et al. 1997), of revealing that elements of past practice persist throughout the present in unacknowledged forms, that the key to sustainability is identifying practices that have in fact been sustained all along because they are precisely sustaining practices. To put it another way, capitalism is an abstraction that presents itself as a totality when in fact everyday life involves a wide range of activities that are not capitalist in nature. Being critical of the unsustainable present, and designing toward non-progressive preferable futures, means finding and amplifying all the ways of being in the world that are persistently noncapitalist, that defy technological ratcheting of expectations around efficiency and comfort and instead entail everyday practices of sustainment (Fry 2003): localist systems of resourcing,

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commons and shared resource use, ways of consuming time that are regenerative of ecosystem health and diversity. This is in essence Gibson-Graham’s political position (2006); that post-capitalism lies in foregrounding the pre-capitalism that sustains in unacknowledged ways current formal economic systems. To ‘Take Back the Economy’ (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013) is to destroy progress by taking the economy back to prior but still persistent, preferable ways of organizing society. In short, destructive designing that works to bring the non-progress-reinforcing preferable into existence entails, Bartleby, the Scrivener’s retort, which became a by-line for the Occupy movement: ‘I prefer not to.’ I prefer not to have a future saturated with social media habits that empower the continued advertising of the unsustainable consumption; I prefer not to have car-based futures even if they are electric and autonomous; I prefer not to be dependent on global commodities and associated forms of employment. I am designing toward futures in which it is possible not to prefer all of those defuturing advancements, in which progress toward these kinds of futures no longer seems fated. I am designing the destruction of the necessity of finding progress preferable. I prefer to live with other kinds of futures, which also means some still existing pasts. I do so by redesigning what has been rendered less preferable. I design to restore practices that systems of bounded rationality have tried to destroy by casting as less preferable. I prefer what I am not supposed to prefer, and I use design to encourage others to join with me in designing only for those kinds of preferences.

References Avelino, Flor, and John Grin. “Beyond deconstruction: A reconstructive perspective on sustainability transition governance.” Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 22 (2017): 15–25. Borgmann, Albert. Technology and the character of contemporary life: A philosophical inquiry. University of Chicago Press, 2009. Borup, Mads, Nik Brown, Kornelia Konrad, and Harro Van Lente. “The sociology of expectations in science and technology.” Technology Analysis & Strategic Management 18, no. 3–4 (2006): 285–298. Braverman, Harry. Labor and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the twentieth century. New York University Press, 1998. Cooper, Gail. Air-conditioning America: Engineers and the controlled environment, 1900–1960. No. 23. JHU Press, 2002. Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. “The consumption junction: A proposal for research strategies in the sociology of technology.” In Bijker, Wiebe E., Thomas Parke Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, eds. The social construction of technological systems: New directions in the sociology and history of technology. MIT Press, 1987. De Wit, Onno, Johannes Cornelis Maria van den Ende, Johan Schot, and Ellen Van Oost. “Innovative junctions: Office technologies in the Netherlands, 1880–1980.” Technology and Culture 43, no. 1 (2002): 50–72. Flusser,Vilém. Shape of things: A philosophy of design. Reaktion Books, 1999. Fry, Tony. Green desires: Ecology, design, products. Eco-Design Foundation, 1992. Fry, Tony. “The voice of sustainment: An introduction.” Design Philosophy Papers 1, no. 1 (2003): 41–48. Fry, Tony. “Design futuring: Sustainability, ethics and new practices. Oxford: Berg, 2009. Gibson-Graham, Julie Katherine. A postcapitalist politics. University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Gibson-Graham, Julie-Katharine, Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy. Take back the economy: An ethical guide for transforming our communities. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Ilmonen, Kaj. “The use of and commitment to goods.” Journal of consumer culture 4, no. 1 (2004): 27–50. Marres, Noortje. Material participation:Technology, the environment and everyday publics. Springer, 2016.

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Michael, Mike. “De-signing the object of sociology: Toward an ‘idiotic’methodology.” The Sociological Review 60, no. 1_suppl (2012): 166–183. Michl, Jan. “On the rumor of functional perfection.” Pro Forma 2 (1991): 67–81. Michl, Jan. “On seeing design as redesign.” Scandinavian Journal of Design History 12, no. 7 (2002). Nordhaus, Ted, and Michael Shellenberger. Break through: From the death of environmentalism to the politics of possibility. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007. Pel, Bonno, Flor R. Avelino, and Shivant S. Jhagroe. “Critical approaches to transitions theory.” In Handbook on sustainability transition and sustainable peace, pp. 451–463. Springer International Publishing, 2016. Schatzki, Theodore R. The timespace of human activity: On performance, society, and history as indeterminate teleological events. Lexington Books, 2010. Scholz, Trebor, and Nathan Schneider, eds. Ours to hack and to own:The rise of platform cooperativism, a new vision for the future of work and a fairer Internet. OR books, 2016. Scott, Kakee, Conny Bakker, and Jaco Quist. “Designing change by living change.” Design Studies 33, no. 3 (2012): 279–297. Shove, Elizabeth. “The shadowy side of innovation: Unmaking and sustainability.” Technology Analysis & Strategic Management 24, no. 4 (2012): 363–375. Shove, Elizabeth, Mika Pantzar, and Matt Watson. The dynamics of social practice: Everyday life and how it changes. Sage, 2012. Simon, Herbert A. The sciences of the artificial. MIT Press, 1996. Spinosa, Charles, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus. Disclosing new worlds: Entrepreneurship, democratic action, and the cultivation of solidarity. MIT Press, 1997. Tonkinwise, Cameron. “Design away.” In Yelavich, Susan and Barbara Adams, eds. Design as Futuremaking. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. Tonkinwise, Cameron. “The interaction design public intellectual.” interactions 23, no. 3 (2016): 24–25. Van den Bergh, Jeroen C.J.M. “Economic-financial crisis and sustainability transition: Introduction to the special issue.” Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 6 (2013): 1–8. Verbeek, Peter-Paul, and Petran Kockelkoren. “The things that matter.” Design Issues 14, no. 3 (1998): 28–42. Walker, Gordon, and Elizabeth Shove. “Ambivalence, sustainability and the governance of sociotechnical transitions.” Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 9, no. 3–4 (2007): 213–225.

7 SPECULATIVE DESIGN AS RESEARCH METHOD From answers to questions and “staying with the trouble” Anne Galloway and Catherine Caudwell

Discourses of speculative design In UK designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects (2001), they argued that design too often unquestioningly reinforces the status quo of industrial and technological progress, and that its primary purpose was “still to provide new products – smaller, faster, different, better” (p. 58). In contrast, they advocated using the medium of design to “challenge industrial agendas” (p. 58), and offer “a critique of the prevailing situation through designs that embody alternative social, cultural, technical or economic values” (p. 58). Originally operating in the fields of industrial and product design, in the fifteen years since publication, this call to arms has been taken up by a wide range of designers, researchers, theorists, and authors. Critical and speculative design also holds an established place in design education, with seminal programs like Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London, UK, and many more continuing to emerge in universities and design schools around the world. In addition to critiquing design itself, contemporary critical and speculative design aims to present alternate social and cultural realities. Dunne and Raby (2013) explain that their speculative practice: thrives on imagination and aims to open up new perspectives on what are sometimes called wicked problems, to create spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being, and to inspire and encourage people’s imaginations to flow freely. (p. 2) More recently, Dunne and Raby have broadened their scope to call for “speculative everything” (2013, p. 161), incorporating not just product design or human needs, but rather “a multitude of worldviews, ideologies, and possibilities” (p. 161). In this speculative design practice, what Dunne and Raby (2013) refer to as “world-building” still happens primarily through physical artefacts, or “parts representing wholes designed to prompt speculation in the viewer about the world these objects belong to” (p. 92). In other words, rather than

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creating the world itself, their intention is to hint at, or conjure, societies and cultures different from their own through the materials and forms of objects. Furthermore, Dunne and Raby seek to “challenge how people think about everyday life” (p. 45), and seem to assume that their critical and speculative designs will encourage viewers to carry out “a sort of imaginary archaeology” (p. 93) that renders the familiar strange but is still grounded within “scientific possibility” (p. 71). Important critiques of this world-building approach are beyond the scope of this chapter, but include Prado and Oliveria (2014) and Oliveira and Prado (2014). Most notably for our interests, critical and speculative design is not presented in terms of how to make or assess objects, but rather in terms of what these objects could or should do. Design fiction is another label given to works of design that imagine, speculate on, and represent alternate visions of design and the worlds it inhabits. In 2009, American designer Julian Bleecker and science fiction author Bruce Sterling separately wrote essays on the concept of design fiction. For Bleecker (2009), design fiction was a way of describing design prototypes that aim to tell stories about the near future. To Sterling (2009), design fiction was essentially science fiction in which the science and objects adhere to design principles and practices, allowing them to offer a grounded critique, or, as Sterling had previously expressed, to move “much closer to the glowing heat of technosocial conflict” (2005, p. 30). Much like Dunne and Raby’s critical and speculative design, design fiction grapples with the cultural, social, and ethical impact of technology, but makes fewer claims to sparking debate or encouraging change. However, design fiction likewise remains more a genre of – or an interpretive framework for – design-in-the-world, than a practice or method for actually doing design. To illustrate this further, both Bleecker (2009) and Sterling (2013) have thoroughly discussed science fiction film and literature under the umbrella of design fiction. Of particular relevance is the discussion of diegetic prototypes, or objects that are capable of representing larger worlds and worldviews. In film, these depictions of nascent technologies or scientific theories are intended to entertain and often create broader public interest. Bleecker (2009) draws attention to this practice as a potent example of the mutual influence of fact and fiction, as diegetic, fictional prototypes in cinema can spur interest in an emerging technology by showing its positive impact, and quelling fears or concerns through the story in which it is embedded. This ease with technology can, in turn, raise its profile in the public imagination, generating demand for its development. David Kirby (2010, 2011) has written extensively on this subject, highlighting examples of films where technology and science consultants were intimately involved in production to “create realistic filmic portrayals of technological possibilities” (p. 43). For example, both Kirby (2010, 2011) and Bleecker (2009) discuss the 2002 film Minority Report at length to highlight its role in driving the recent development of gestural interfaces.

Speculative narratives & the question of reception Possibly due to the sheer proliferation of self-described critical and speculative design projects online (see for example Core77, 2011; Antonelli, 2011), and accompanying public discussions of design fiction (see for example Nova, 2013; Sterling, 2004), these creative practices began to garner the attention of social science and humanities scholars working in the areas of emerging science and technology. For example, DiSalvo (2009) convincingly argues that speculative

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design and design fiction’s modes of storytelling are found in the formal qualities of design, the expertise of a designer, and consumer culture. Through an expert understanding of how products are conceptualized, developed, and marketed, the speculative design “projection is plausible and persuasive because the representations are so easily consumed in the present (they are visually striking) and imaginable to be consumed in the future (they appear like we envisage such ‘real’ products would appear)” (DiSalvo, 2009, p. 55). Of course, this raises questions about what is actually being challenged, and who the audience for speculative design could, or ought to be. Indeed, the question of how audiences might most productively engage with speculative and critical design is far from resolved, even amongst its own practitioners. Dunne and Raby (2001) originally placed sense-making in the hands of the audience, as they expected “the user would become a protagonist and co-producer of narrative experience rather than a passive consumer of a product’s meaning” (p. 46). However, subsequent practitioners and critics have noted this is not a self-evident process. For example, despite what specific materials and forms may communicate, Malpass (2013) points out that contextualizing information beyond the object itself is usually necessary: Because of their provisional and unfamiliar characteristics, many objects of speculative design require a detailed supporting narrative to establish their use. This is established through scenario building, where objects and technologies are situated in contexts of use, and through technocratic visualization. (p. 348) Dunne and Raby (2013) also maintain that their speculative designs are primarily objects, and to them, “[v]ideo and photography are secondary media. The physical prop is the starting point for a chain reaction developed through other media rather than a reality anchor for the video” (p. 100). However, Malpass (2013) suggests that it is actually the combination of media that tells a story as “the critique is established through a synthesis of objects and contextualizing material” (p. 348). This supplementary material is also required because this kind of fictional design is still developing, and encountered by audiences who may not know the role(s) they are expected to play. Malpass (2015, 2016) calls this shift towards storytelling – and the expectation that viewers become storytellers instead of listeners or consumers – speculative design’s ‘rhetorical function,’ or its capacity to communicate a narrative. Malpass (2015, p. 65) argues that understandings of function are a significant barrier to understanding speculative works, as in design, function is traditionally concerned with optimization, or the extent to which use is made technically efficient and practical. Nonetheless, drawing a link to literary storytelling, Auger (2013) affirms that viewers should recognize a speculative object as belonging in their everyday life, and unfold a story accordingly: The presence of the designed artefact in popular culture allows for the viewer to project its presence into his or her own life. Then they effectively become the protagonist in the story, playing out individual and informative roles. Their reactions become the true products of this form of design research. (p. 20)

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Speculative design as research method Given its interest in using storytelling to engage audiences, can speculative design be effectively used as a sociocultural research method? Ferri et al. (2014) suggest that without a clear and shared understanding of what speculative and critical design is, it will not be possible to evaluate projects against each other, or assess their success. More optimistically, Knutz, Markussen and Christensen (2014) propose a typology of design fiction that can be applied for comparison and contrast of different projects.This involves five characteristics: the basic role of fiction, which asks what is the ‘what-if ’ question at hand; the manifestation of the critique, which asks how the project is critical; the design aims, which questions the possible consequences of the project; the materialization and form, which questions the form the project takes; and the aesthetic of design fiction, which categorizes the project’s political perspective (p. 8–10). This humanities-based approach suggests that research methodology and validity might be found in the critical (i.e., ethical and aesthetical) capacity of individual stories. Embracing a more social-scientific approach, Bardzell, J., Bardzell, S. and Stolterman (2014) ask: How can the technologies, practices, norms, and/or ideologies we wish to explore be expressed in the language of design? During brainstorming, sketching, and prototyping phases, how do we know if we’re on the right track? How do we assess or evaluate critical designs? What sorts of effects do we expect, want, or need a critical design to have? (pp. 1951–1952) They further argue that critical design in particular needs strategies in place for reading its works in order to convey the designer’s intended meaning – if only to encourage critical reflection on design’s role in our present and future lives (p. 1959). Related is the call for a clear framework for actually doing speculative design: one that effectively addresses a specific issue or phenomena, rather than a general questioning of mainstream design. To do so, Bardzell et al. (2012) chose a salient issue in feminist HumanComputer Interaction research – the gendering of spaces – and created design prototypes to give to participants in order to elicit responses regarding the perceived provocativeness of the design. Recalling Dunne and Raby’s (2001) assertion that good critical design sits between strangeness and normality (p. 63), Bardzell et al. (2012) interviewed participants and reached the conclusion that “achieving this ‘slight strangeness’ is anything but straightforward, as it plays out across conceptual, functional, material, and aesthetic dimensions of design in complex ways” (p. 294). By conducting focused conversations with people engaged in their critical designs, Bardzell et al. (2012) were also able to highlight the impact on viewers or audiences – something absent from Dunne and Raby’s critical practice, as they more often focus on what their intentions are, rather than what their designs actually achieve. Other ways of using speculative design to engage audiences includes design friction and critical making. Forlano and Matthew (2014) employ speculative design in their workshopbased research to encourage stakeholders to engage with frictions and controversies surrounding urban technologies. The authors highlight that speculative design is often criticized for elitism as it “often does not move beyond the realm of the museum exhibit” (p. 11), but argue that public workshops are effective means of raising questions about participants’ futureoriented concerns and issues. Critical making is another design research practice that aims to

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reflect on social and cultural values and beliefs related to technology. Ratto (2011) explains that critical making “differs from these practices in its focus on the constructive process as the site for analysis and its explicit connections to specific scholarly literature” (2011, p. 253). This is achieved through a “review of relevant literature and compilation of useful concepts and theories . . . mined for specific ideas that can be metaphorically ‘mapped’ to material prototypes, and explored through fabrication” (p. 253). In other words, rather than displaying designed objects to an audience, in critical making it is the act of creation, fabrication, and contextualization or discussion that is the central focus. Ratto claims that this engagement creates personal investment in addressing matters of concern, problematizing connections between society and technology, and creates deeper conceptual understandings of technical innovation. Ultimately, Ratto distinguishes critical making through the notion of care, the fostering of “a ‘caring for’ that is not typically part of either technical or social scholarly education” (p. 259). We believe that all these approaches offer productive ways of advancing speculative design as creative practice and research method, and that a combination of humanities and socialscience devices may provide the greatest range of opportunities for future researchers. The remainder of this chapter will provide a case study from the first author’s research and end with shared reflections.

Case study: grow your own lamb Counting Sheep: NZ Merino in an Internet of Things was a Royal Society of New Zealandfunded research project that explored how contemporary production and consumption of New Zealand merino wool and meat might be (re)shaped by emerging technologies like the Internet of Things. The first part of the project comprised a multi-site ethnography of NZ merino breeding, and case studies of industry production and marketing strategies. The second part of the project ‘translated’ this research into a set of four speculative design propositions for public engagement, published online at: http://countingsheep.info/ along with an audience survey. Grow Your Own Lamb was a near-future scenario created to explore the possibility of both emerging technoscience and increased consumer control over animal husbandry and meat production (http://countingsheep.info/grow-your-own-lamb.html). The first option in this fictional service allows consumers to grow their own in vivo (paddock-raised) lamb meat (http://countingsheep.info/grow-your-own-lamb-in-vivo. html). From the selection of breeding rams and ewes, to their care, feeding, and eventual slaughter, consumers can use an app (and its associated identification and location technologies) to track the pregnant ewe, and later, the lamb. If at any time the consumer is not satisfied with the treatment of the animals, they can contact the farmer, who is required to respond within six hours; they are also invited to visit the farm at any time. The scenario relies on audiences recognizing written and visual metaphors for cultural authenticity and artisanal food, as well as the well-worn trope of consumer empowerment through technology use – although in this case the farmer (producer) is arguably disempowered at the same time because of unprecedented surveillance. The second service option offers in vitro, or lab-raised meat, as an exploration of cultured meat markets and the possible replacement of farmers by lab technicians, alongside the rise of a new kind of consumer-scientist (http://countingsheep.info/grow-your-own-lamb-invitro.html). Again relying on a range of surveillance technologies, consumers are encouraged to constantly monitor the growth of their meat in a refined rural-lab setting.

FIGURE 7.1 “Merino ewes and lambs raised on lush, green pasture.” Grow Your Own Lamb – In Vivo.

Copyright Anne Galloway.

FIGURE 7.2 “Fresh

lamb cutlets produced your way!” Grow Your Own Lamb – In Vivo.

Copyright Anne Galloway and Matasila Freshwater.

FIGURE 7.3 “Cultured food animals listen to Radio New Zealand.” Grow Your Own Lamb – In Vitro.

Copyright Anne Galloway and Matasila Freshwater.

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FIGURE 7.4 “Meat

and fibre: felted racks of lamb.” Grow Your Own Lamb – In Vitro.

Copyright Anne Galloway and Matasila Freshwater.

Both the visual and written rhetoric were designed to maintain the comforting feel of the in vivo system of production, while providing tongue-in-cheek features like being able to place growing meat in a window with a view and Radio New Zealand for company. Playing with a muscle and wool fibre metaphor, we decided to make the meat out of felted wool; this choice of craft material allowed us to soften or feminize the stereotypically male space of laboratories, as well as attempt to normalize a product that is often referred to by media as monstrous. While we had no personal interest in promoting or condemning either option, it was our intention as design researchers to offer a (relatively) plausible and appealing service that might encourage audience reflection on the relationship between technology, producers, and consumers. Besides limitations inherent in the English-speaking Internet, there was no specific target audience for our online exhibition – although we did ask survey respondents to identify their occupation, and we were almost always able to identify location by IP address.

Audience responses & design research reflections The Grow Your Own Lamb proposition featured what Mike Michael (2012) calls “difficult” objects, or ones that: warp the scientific and the social (as mediated by the designers) – they have implications that are good and bad, individual and collective, internal and external, biological and cultural, emancipatory and authoritarian, modest and arrogant, cruel and funny, academic and commercial, serious and playful, and of course, designerly and scientific. (p. 542) Following Haraway (2008), our speculative design work aimed “to build attachment sites and tie sticky knots to bind intra-acting critters, including people, together in the kinds of response and regard that change the subject – and the object” (p. 287). But as we argued above, these responses and changes are not given; rather they are both more and less than what researchers may intend, expect, or hope.

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The first issue we encountered was the kind of public that constituted our audience. Not only was it quite small – we received only 54 responses to all four scenarios – but a full 40% of these respondents identified as working in a university, and design was the most commonly selected personal interest. These data do little to counter the above-mentioned concerns that speculative design speaks best, if not also predominantly, to itself. However, our research questions were qualitative not quantitative – and there were interesting contributions made to ‘public’ discourse on how meat is produced and consumed. The in vivo scenario was generally well received from a consumer perspective, and demonstrated a range of concerns: This scenario seems . . . appealing because I think I’d enjoy keeping track of my in-vivo lamb and then enjoying a nice roast. – Unknown Respondent, Australia I like the idea that consumers have some say in how their meat is produced, with the ability to visit the farm. – Farm Respondent, New Zealand Interesting because I can have my own lamb and tracked I know who is, where came from, the freshness of the meat, what the animal ate during his period of life etc. – Unknown Respondent, Italy I like the idea of being very conscious of where the food we consume comes from; and as a consumer having a better ‘big picture’ view of the ecosystem/infrastructure/ heritage/history of food. – Government Respondent, New Zealand The idea is not an easy take for most people, since we’re used (at least from where I’m from, in Brazil) about NOT having a clue about where our food comes from, who the producers are or how the animal was treated. We’re one of the largest countries exporting meat worldwide, still we don’t have sufficient information about it’s processes. I’m concerned about the path we’re leading to the future, and for that I believe this scenario can be appealing. Consciousness and transparency are necessary. The question is if that sort of information is capable of changing behaviors, of empowering people to act in a different way. – University Respondent, Brazil Nevertheless, more ambiguous, and sometimes negative, perspectives arose in relation to what it might be like for the producer, demonstrating the audience’s comprehension of the complexity of these issues: Paddock raised I found interesting and provocative. This scenario is an extreme end of producer/consumer relationship. – Industry Respondent, New Zealand General logistics of physically (in vivo) farming each individual . . . and the constant monitoring of what is going on with each individual animal [is problematic]. Plus the consumer being able to have so much input into what the farmer is doing would, in

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my opinion, add stress to what is already a stressful job. Also not sure how consumers would cope with getting to the end of ‘raising’ their lamb and then making the choice on how/when to kill and butcher. Not a lot of people actually want to do ‘the dirty work,’ myself included, and I have lived rurally most of my life. – Farm Respondent, New Zealand Some elements . . . raised go a step too far in that the consumer is driving the process but probably doesn’t have the experience or knowledge on how best to achieve the result. Best left to those in the know, I don’t tell my dentist how to fix my teeth, he is the expert. – Industry Respondent, New Zealand On the other hand, responses to the in vitro scenario were often conflicted, if not completely opposed, and unlike the in vivo scenario, respondents commented specifically on our images: Lab raised I found disturbing and alarming. Not at all interested or would support non natural food production – yes I would starve before eating it . . . Everything about lab raised is a bad idea. – Industry Respondent, New Zealand Turned off by the blood images and not sure I would want to eat it . . . yet I know this is likely to be the more sustainable option for future food production and is contributing to advances in scientific research. – University Respondent, Australia I like to think that I’m pro-progress and pro-science but I don’t think I could eat the meat from the in-vitro scenario. . . . I think the photography on the in-vitro scenario page gives the strong impression of a lab-based process trying really hard to still seem ‘natural.’Though I think if it was presented as a clean or sterile lab-based process I’d also find it creepy. Either way it’s got a real sense of the uncanny valley about it. – Unknown Respondent, Australia I think it’s probably a good idea for this process to take place in a controlled environment, like a state of the art lab, in order to establish credibility and a sense of trust and order with the public . . . Initially, without reading the information included with the images, I thought this was something grown at home. I thought it was a kit you brought into your kitchen and grew there on the spot. Maybe instead of having technicians who grow the meat for the customer, there could be an option where the growing process is taught to the customer (in a workshop or the like).This way, the customer could take it home and maybe gain a sense of attachment through meat rearing. – University Respondent, United States of America More positive responses were divided between support for the science itself and support for our design work: Growing meat in vitro would radically reduce the environmental footprint of the substance and no animal suffering is involved. It’s a brilliant solution. Many people might think this concept is unappetizing but if they knew how meat really is produced

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traditionally and the consequences of modern industrial farming practices (i.e. antibiotic resistance, animal suffering, unsanitary processing, etc.) many would consider in vitro safer, more sanitary and overall more appealing. – University Respondent, South Africa Found the in vitro quite amusing, actually did laugh out loud as the lamb chop had views of the field outside and got to listen to the radio . . . Great for opening communication between producers and consumers. – Farm Respondent, New Zealand It’s like a technological version of the craft socialism of William Morris. Only chops. Tasty tasty chops. – NGO Respondent, Location unknown The possibility of audience indifference or disinterest rarely comes up in discussions of speculative design, and even if we cannot account for it, we can still ‘see’ it at work here in the limited number of responses – and it must be said to temper any claims of robust ‘public engagement.’ Nonetheless, that should not prevent us from questioning what kind of public was involved. Because the designs sought to elicit reflection on inherently political matters, such as labour relations and surveillance, it may be tempting to claim them as examples of adversarial design (cf. DiSalvo, 2012). However, despite respondents having divergent political positions, we believe that without the opportunity for direct engagement with each other, an active agonistic politics was actually prevented. Likewise, Le Dantec (2016, p. 122) argues that “issues, attachments and the work of infrastructuring are the entangled components that constitute a public” – and although we have evidence for the first two elements, support for taking citizenly action on these issues and attachments was absent. Rather than assuming a general public-in-waiting that would respond directly to our interests and designerly expertise, or even assemble citizen publics, the Grow Your Own Lamb scenario instead supported what the first author has previously referred to as a temporary, or mobile, public gathered around a specific matter of concern, whose goal is to (be)come together (Galloway, 2010). Put a bit differently, our designs can be understood as “capacitators for moving in and out of different social gels, including the capacity to take on an identity that is able to speak and to participate in specific contexts” (Sheller, 2004, p. 50) – in this case, our survey forum. Given the kind of respondents we had, we also find Michael’s (2012) description of speculative design’s public to be useful: The public seems to be composed of more or less fully rounded persons, more or less able to confront with cognitive and emotional maturity (for want of a better phrase) [the] novel . . . designerly artifacts. What is particularly interesting is that this ‘maturity’ is characterized by a capacity to entertain, deal with, and explore the confusion, ambiguity, blurriness of the issues associated with these objects. This is a tacit model of the public where its members suffer neither from intellectual deficit nor citizenly shortcomings – rather, it is a constituency whose role is not to be ‘citizenly’ (whatever form that might take) within a context of policy making, but thoughtful within a context of complexity. (p. 541)

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In addition, just as our speculative designs did not seek to solve problems, the kind of public engagement that arose did not provide solutions. Rather than seeing this as a failure of either our research or its impact, we suggest that the respondents’ thoughtful engagement indicates its own form of success. Recalling previously discussed approaches to evaluating design, rather than defining success by whether or not the intentions of the designer were met – or if we were able to directly support citizen action – our case of public engagement might be best described as fostering what Haraway (2016) calls “staying with the trouble” and sym-poiesis, or “making-with.” In summary, we believe that speculative design offers much promise as a form of “undesign” that requires a shift from viewing it solely as a form of research output or possible solutions to possible problems, to a method of research, or means of asking questions and generating new connections. Indeed, we might even go so far as to suggest that our case study produced so many questions for further research that it would have been more productive to do this work at the beginning of the project instead of the end – or at least in a more iterative fashion. Ultimately, more research is needed, but we are confident that speculative design offers the potential to support new kinds of publics and different forms of action. Moreover, in a complex and damaged world, that may be exactly what is needed.

Acknowledgements The Counting Sheep: NZ Merino in an Internet of Things (2011–2014) research project was generously supported with a grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund. Special thanks to Mata Freshwater, without whose exceptional craft and photography skills, Grow Your Own Lamb would not have been possible.

References Antonelli, P. (2011). States of design 04: Critical design. Domus 949. Retrieved from www.domusweb.it/ en/design/2011/08/31/states-of-design-04-critical-design.html Auger, J. (2013). Speculative design: Crafting the speculation. Digital Creativity, 24(1), 11–35. doi:10.10 80/14626268.2013.767276 Bardzell, S., Bardzell, J., Forlizzi, J., Zimmerman, J., & Antanitis, J. (2012). Critical design and critical theory: The challenge of designing for provocation. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK. doi:10.1145/2317956.2318001 Bardzell, J., Bardzell, S., & Stolterman, E. (2014). Reading critical designs: Supporting reasoned interpretations of critical design. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Toronto, ON. doi:10.1145/2556288.2557137 Bleecker, J. (2009). Design fiction [web essay]. Retrieved from http://drbfw5wfjlxon.cloudfront.net/ writing/DesignFiction_WebEdition.pdf Core77 (2011). 2011 Speculative objects/concepts: Core77 design awards. Core77 [website]. Retrieved October 26, 2016, from www.core77designawards.com/2011/awards/speculative-objects-concepts/ DiSalvo, C. (2009). Design and the construction of publics. Design Issues, 25(1), 48–63. doi:10.1162/ desi.2009.25.1.48 DiSalvo, C. (2012). Adversarial design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2001). Design noir:The secret life of electronic objects. Berlin: Birkhauser. Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: Design, fiction, and social dreaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ferri, G., Bardzell, J., Bardzell, S., & Louraine, S. (2014). Analyzing critical designs: categories, distinctions, and canons of exemplars. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems,Vancouver, BC. doi:10.1145/2598510.2598588

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Forlano, L., & Matthew, A. (2014). From design fiction to design friction: Speculative and participatory design of values-embedded urban technology. Journal of Urban Technology, 21(4), 7–24. doi:10.1080/ 10630732.2014.971525 Galloway, A. (2010). Mobile publics and issues-based art and design. In B. Crow, M. Longford, & K. Sawchuck (eds.), The wireless spectrum: The politics, practices, and poetics of mobile media (pp. 63–76). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Haraway, D. (2008). When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kirby, D. (2010).The future is now: Diegetic prototypes and role of popular films in generating real-world technological development. Social Studies of Science, 4(1), 41–70. doi:10.1177/0306312709338325 Kirby, D. (2011). Lab coats in hollywood: Science, scientists, and cinema. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Knutz, E., Markussen, T., & Christensen, P. R. (2014). The role of fiction in experiments within design, art, & architecture. Artifact, 3(2), 8.1–8.13. doi:10.14434/artifact.v3i2.4045 Le Dantec, C.A. (2016). Designing publics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Malpass, M. (2013). Between wit and reason: Defining associative, speculative, and critical design in practice. Design and Culture, 5(3), 333–356. doi:10.2752/175470813X13705953612200 Malpass, M. (2015). Criticism and function in critical design practice. Design Issues, 31(2), 59–71. doi:10.1162/DESI_a_00322 Malpass, M. (2016). Critical design practice: Theoretical perspectives and methods of engagement. The Design Journal, 19(3), 473–489. doi:10.1080/14606925.2016.1161943 Michael, M. (2012). “What are we busy doing?” Engaging the idiot. Science, Technology,  & Human Values, 37(5) 528–554. doi:10.1177/0162243911428624 Nova, N. (2013, September 17). Ethnography, speculative fiction and design. Ethnography Matters [online]. Retrieved October 26, 2016, from http://ethnographymatters.net/blog/2013/09/17/ september-2013-ethnography-speculative-fiction-and-design/ Oliveira, P., & Prado, L. (2014, September 11). Cheat sheet for a non- (or less-) colonialist speculative design. Medium [online]. Retrieved August 26, 2016, from https://medium.com/a-parede/cheatsheet-for-a-non-or-less-colonialist-speculative-design-9a6b4ae3c465#.ezn3dpooa Prado, L., & Oliveria, P. (2014, February 5). Questioning the ‘critical’ in speculative and critical design. Medium [online]. Retrieved September 27, 2016, from https://medium.com/a-parede/questioningthe-critical-in-speculative-critical-design-5a355cac2ca4#.s3i439807 Ratto, M. (2011). Critical making: Conceptual and material studies in technology and social life. Information Society, 27(4), 252–260. doi:10.1080/01972243.2011.583819 Sheller, M. (2004). Mobile publics: Beyond the network perspective. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22(1), 39–52. doi:https://doi.org/10.1068/d324t Sterling, B. (2004). When blojects rule the earth [Keynote address]. Presented at the SIGGRAPH 31st International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, Los Angeles, CA. Sterling, B. (2005). Shaping things. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sterling, B. (2009). Design fiction. Interactions, 16(3), 20–24. doi:10.1145/1516016.1516021 Sterling, B (2013, October 11) Patently untrue: Fleshy defibrillators and synchronized baseball are changing the future. Wired Magazine. Retrieved September 27, 2016, from www.wired.co.uk/ article/patently-untrue

8 INHABITING PRACTICES Operating between art, design, science and technology Leah Heiss

FIGURE 8.1 Leah

Heiss | Polarity (detail) 2012 | Installation, magnetic liquid, propylene glycol, ethanol, glass vessels, motors, rare earth magnets, table | National New Media Art Award 2012, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, August 3–November 4, 2012

|Photograph: Mark Sherwood, QAGOMA| © Courtesy: The artist

Introduction Operating over a decade, my practice has ranged across collaborative projects that encompass swallowable gas sensors to detect disease; jewellery to administer insulin through the skin; vessels to decontaminate drinking water of arsenic and other impurities; new forms

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for hearing technologies; and SOS jewellery to communicate allergies and illness in times of medical crises. Central to these projects is the emotional relationship between people and their technologies. The projects seek to flesh out the relationships between people and artefacts; and between people and other people. The notion of relationship building exists through the development of trans-disciplinary teams that span many specialisations – including audiology, engineering, health sciences, electronics, computer science, fashion design and textile technology; it is paramount in working with next-generation materials – the building of relationships with matter; and through the use of wearables as a site for investigation – building relationships between the body and designed artefacts. Working across disciplinary borders and boundaries requires that I be able to speak enough of the technical or scientific languages relevant to each project to allow for free passage through the task at hand. This chapter provides one model for a next-generation design practice in which the practitioner moves seamlessly between art, design, science and technology to create projects for health and wellbeing. I introduce the reader to a range of projects that illustrate the generative practices underpinning the work: empathy, trans-disciplinarity, embedding, material brainstorming, iterative experimentation and wearables as a site for therapeutic potential. The breadth of the projects to be discussed helps to support the assertion that it is how the work is made as much as what is made that is pivotal for truly innovating in creative practice.

Empathy as a driver of collaboration Empathy is central to the way that the practice operates and is manifest in four key considerations: the relationship between people and their technologies; my relationship with the final user of therapeutic technologies; collaboration in trans-disciplinary teams; and the tacit knowledge required to work with next-generation materials and processes – forming a kind of material empathy. Evan Thompson (2005) suggests: As an intentional capacity, empathy is the basic ability to comprehend another individual’s experience, a capacity that underlies all the particular feelings and emotions one can have for another.To exercise this capacity is to engage empathy as an intentional act and intentional process. As a unique kind of intentional act, empathy is directed toward, and thereby has as its intentional correlate, the experience of another person. (p. 263) The notion of intentionality suggested by Thompson is pivotal to this practice as it underscores the intent to empathise when entering collaborative teams. Engagement with practitioners from other sectors is encountered from the outset with a will to see the problem from their perspective, rather than arriving at the problem with a strong alignment with one’s discipline. In order to understand the problem from the perspective of another discipline requires a basic knowledge of the key tasks and lexicon of that discipline, whether this be engineering or weaving. This knowledge is built over time, further enhanced and refined with each new set of project interactions. In addition to drawing on empathic structures to promote innovation in the team structure, I also foreground empathy in my consideration of the final user of the technologies I am

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designing. The ability to empathise is crucially important when working in the therapeutic context. It underpins interactions with users, collaborators and colleagues in healthcare settings and allows me, as a designer, to contemplate the human being at the end of the making process and to ask important questions, such as: 1 2

What is the impact of my work on the final user who is trying to manage discomfort – physical or psychological? How can this project positively affect the psychological experience of the patient?

Developing a robust understanding of the emotional connection that a user has with a technology or artefact allows me to bring a deeper level of understanding to the design process. In phase one of the Diabetes Jewellery project in 2007, I was concerned with inhabiting the emotional life-world of teenage diabetics.This involved imaginatively transposing myself into the lives of these final users and thinking deeply about the types of artefacts that might be relevant in those lives.The outcomes of this creative transposition were highly colourful rings and textile cuffs for teenagers. Adolescence is a period of emerging independence paralleled by dramatic physical, psychological and emotional development. Arguably, teenagers have a heightened focus on the present moment, and less interest in the seemingly abstract, long-term effects of their immediate health choices (Timms & Lowes, 1999). These conditions converge to make teenage compliance with drug regimens a complex problem – particularly when the medical regime is complex or painful (Moore et al., 2013). A study by Hentinen and Kyngas found that “sixtysix per cent (of teenagers) admitted delaying or withholding their insulin to fit in socially, with 30% doing this on a weekly basis, usually to enable them to eat more, sleep in and drink alcohol” (in Timms & Lowes, 1999, p. 800). The design challenge with the teenage Diabetes Jewellery project was to design a set of colourful rings that could be interchanged and worn in the high school context without signifying illness. Using NanoVic’s NanoMAP1 technology allowed for the insulin to be administered over a longer time period in a slow-release format. Key to designing for this demographic is a keen awareness of the emotional relationship that teenagers have with their possessions, including their medical devices. My intention in designing the rings was threefold: to create jewellery that teenagers might actually want to wear and maintain; to provide choice – for the teenager to wear multiple rings, some active and some inactive – and to wear different colours and patterns each day; and to move away from any recognisable language of illness, the rings needed to look like fashion accessories rather than medical devices. Natalie Depraz (2001) proposes that there are four stages of empathy: first, the passive association of my lived body with the lived body of another; second, the imaginative transposal of myself to the place of another; third, the interpretation or understanding of myself as another for you; and finally, ethical responsibility for the Other. Within the context of working in therapeutic settings, I translate these four stages to mean: 1 2 3 4

recognising the existence of the user/patient; understanding from their point of view what the issue is – for example, dealing with anxiety while waiting in accident and emergency; or managing pain during medical procedures; changing places with the patient and experiencing his/her pain or discomfort; and acknowledging their need for, and right to, a solution for this pain or discomfort.

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Recognition of and reflection on this empathic framework, particularly phases 3 and 4, has underpinned the development of the Smart Heart project – a necklace for long-term cardiac monitoring. The Smart Heart necklace is a project that has involved a team of electronic engineers, weavers, designers, health experts and 3D modellers to develop a wearable cardiac monitor necklace with the capacity to collect, store and remotely transmit cardiac data collected over an extended period for analysis by medical professionals. The wearable device will also store the patient’s emergency contact information and medical history, so that in the event of a heart attack, emergency staff could easily access contact details, medical history, and recent heart waveforms. The necklace is aimed at patients who have recently suffered a heart attack or who are experiencing heart rhythm problems and who would typically be fitted with a Holter monitor or similar device (Zimetbaum & Goldman, 2010). The Smart Heart necklace seeks to address the discomfort experienced by users who need to have cardiac monitoring. Current Holter monitors typically comprise small recorders worn on a sling or belt that can continuously collect data over a 24- to 48-hour period from two or three ECG leads attached to the chest. The primary users of cardiac monitors are in the 70–85 year age range, and they often require tests or treatments that require the use of adhesives.Within this age group, many people exhibit skin conditions ranging from decreased fluid retention, thinning, xerosis (dryness), eczema, irritation and itching (Barr, 2006). Regular, repeated use of ECG diagnostic systems using conventional wet electrodes may exacerbate these symptoms. Removal of tape and adhesives can, for instance, increase the risk of eczema

FIGURE 8.2 The Smart Heart cardiac monitor necklace. Developed in collaboration with Associate

Professor Keely Macarow, Associate Professor Paul Beckett, St.Vincent’s Hospital and the Nossal Institute for Global Health. Funding provided by the Gandel Foundation. Photograph by Narelle Portanier

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(Avenel-audran et al., 2003; Konya et al., 2010) and, in severe cases, can result in skin tears (Reddy, 2008). In order to sidestep the need for adhesives, a key area of product innovation in the project has been the development of a conductive woven band to house the electronics for the necklace. This band, which has been created with a team of weavers, detects the ECG at the back of the neck and seamlessly delivers this information to the jewel structures at the front of the necklace, which house signal processing equipment and battery capacity, negating the requirement for stick-on electrodes and bulky technology. In order to fully understand the experience of people in the 70–85 year age bracket, I have conducted several focus group interviews in aged care facilities. The key aim of these encounters has been to understand more deeply how people in this demographic feel about their wearable health technologies and the experience they have had with the technologies we are trying to improve upon.Traditional wet electrodes require a good connection in order to deliver a reliable signal, and cardiac technicians ensure this immovable connection by using mildly abrasive skin ‘sandpaper’. One participant, who required regular cardiac monitoring, spoke about removing the electrodes during an interview: “That’s the worst part – if you’ve got 8 or 10 of ‘em on your body – takes you a week to get ‘em off.” This personal experience with the irritations of adhesive electrodes was a very emotional declaration by the participant, underscoring the impact of this seemingly benign technology. A common technology within aged care environments is the falls monitor.When speaking to participants about this technology they shared many stories that foregrounded a range of pertinent issues, including the way in which the technology might function, or not, at critical times. One participant shared the following story Now my next-door neighbour was nearly 100 when this happened, she fell over going to the toilet one night. Unfortunately she had her bracelet on her arm and unfortunately it got caught under her body and she couldn’t get up. She was there all night. Nobody knew because she wasn’t able to press the button. Now I don’t know how you get over that problem. Another participant shared the following: “I take mine off when I’m in bed because I’m frightened I’ll knock it because I’m very restless in bed. Then I put it back on again.” Such experiences with falls technology were common in the interviews that I conducted, participants were concerned that they would roll onto the device, thus alerting staff when there was not a crisis. The solution was to not wear the monitor at nighttime, which was a paradox as this is the timeframe in which many falls occur.The relevance of the falls monitor feedback to the Smart Heart is that it foregrounds user engagement with health technologies within this age bracket.The feedback from these human engagement studies is being folded back into the ongoing development of the Smart Heart necklace and other associated projects.

Working across borders and boundaries – embedding as a key tool in trans-disciplinary practice Over the last decade, I have been working across traditional boundaries, borders and specialisations to develop projects that aim to improve or even save life. Project teams have coalesced emergency medicine practitioners, nanotechnologists, engineers, weavers, computer scientists, and most recently audiologists. Within the bounds of my practice, I define trans-disciplinary

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FIGURE 8.3 Wearable

falls monitor on the wrist of a resident in an aged care facility

collaboration as a transformative experience in which practitioners engage laterally with disciplines, technologies, user groups, structures and skill sets to produce new knowledge.This working definition is informed by the work of Gethman (2014) who suggest that “Trans-disciplinary efforts address therefore the competent actors and institutions as well as the affected parties” (p. 41), a definition that highlights the importance of interaction between experts but also maintains a focus on the end user of the technology. Key to my practice is the experience of being ‘embedded’ within a scientific or medical context. This embedding may be through a residency – for instance, those provided through Federal or State government funding; within a University research lab; or within a private company. Throughout my design career I have undertaken three key examples of such embedding: with Nanotechnology Victoria from 2007 to 2008; in the RMIT Centre for Materials Innovation and Future Fashion in 2014–15; and with Blamey Saunders hears in 2016. The aim of embedding is to develop the required languages and skills to move freely though transdisciplinary projects and to maximise access to key project resources including personnel, technologies and facilities. It also facilitates expeditious response to changes in organisational culture or innovation strategy, and provides an important opportunity to observe first hand the interactions between professionals and technologies; between experts and the public; and between members of project teams. Through 2007–8, I was embedded in Nanotechnology Victoria through an Artist in Residency (AIR) program, supported by Arts Victoria in association with The Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT).The residency, titled ‘Subtle Technologies’, set out to address the question: Is it possible to augment our personal artefacts with extra functionalities – the power to heal, correct, and treat our physical ailments? At the time of my residency NanoVic

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were involved in the development of around twenty projects that ranged from biomedical technologies through to agricultural and environmental developments. I found that many of the nanotechnologies were simply too complex or abstract to engage with through my creative practice except in representational ways. Therefore, in order to manage the large number of potential technologies I developed two criteria: 1 2

They should be focused on human wellbeing. They needed to be of a tangible scale.

Through the process of interviewing the scientists and filtering any technologies that did not fulfil my criteria, I settled on two technologies to investigate: mesoporous iron oxide – for removing arsenic from drinking water; and trans-dermal patches: small circular discs with a surface of microneedles which allow for nano-engineered drug molecules (such as insulin) to be administered through the skin. Working with these technologies and the nanotechnology scientists, I developed the Diabetes Jewellery and Arsenic Jewellery and Vessels through to functioning prototype stage. There were many positive outcomes of my embedding in the NanoVic team – both for my creative practice and for the organisational culture, communication practices and working methodologies of the organisation. Arguably, creative practitioners are adept at working to tight timeframes and making abstract ideas concrete through physical or pictorial representation, while expanding the frames of reference of a project by locating it within broader social

FIGURE 8.4 Diabetes

jewellery – applicator necklace, developed in collaboration with Nanotechnology Victoria, 2007–8.

Photograph by Narelle Portanier.

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and cultural frameworks. Within the NanoVic environment, I used my design skills in idea visualisation (through sketching, diagramming, concept development etc.) to generate and communicate project strategies in ways that were tangible and relevant to the scientists. This, combined with a determination to think beyond technology and consider the whole-of-life experience of the final user, was an important shift for scientists trained to focus intensively on the technological issue at hand and less on longer-term human experience issues.Through integrating nanotechnologies into human-centred projects (jewellery, vessels), the hard science gained a wider audience through lifestyle and arts media, television, radio, exhibitions and design conferences. For example, the projects were included on television science program The New Inventors, and featured in print articles that were syndicated to over 40 publications around America, Canada and Asia. The learning from this experience was further built upon during a period of being embedded at the RMIT Centre for Materials Innovation and Future Fashion (CMIFF) in 2014– 2015. My time in CMIFF was characterised by working between advanced fibres, traditional weaving techniques, mechanised weaving, and electronic development, whilst developing the Smart Heart cardiac monitor necklace. Working in an environment with advanced textiles machinery including Jacquard looms, digital and 3D knitting machines, with the expertise of specialist textile engineers allowed me to test a wide range of ideas in a short period of time. The challenge of this project was to develop a soft woven sensor to replace the hard electronics that are typically used for cardiac monitoring, but which still delivers accurate data. The key benefit of being embedded within CMIFF throughout this innovation period was that I was able to iteratively prototype the development of conductive electrodes using a traditional loom, an industrial jacquard loom, an electronic embroidery machine, and mechanised knitting machines. The iterative nature of the project work that was undertaken throughout this period was possible only through ongoing access to the technologies and resources of a specialised textiles laboratory. Such access to resources and expertise undeniably highlights an advantage of working within the structure of a university research laboratory, such equipment being beyond the financial possibility for most Australian companies.

Hands-on material brainstorming to proliferate design ideas Much of the work that I have generated over the past decade has been focused on designing for future scenarios, opening up the conversation about what a medical device could possibly be, rather than be constrained by what is currently available. The lead time for the development of therapeutic technologies is a long process which commences with the generation of an idea, feasibility studies, development and refinement of the technology, device design and development, clinical trials and infiltration into the market: a process which can take anywhere from five to 15 years (Heiss & Morgan, 2010). In order to circumvent this protracted timeframe, I have generated a workshop approach to prototyping future forms for health technologies, prior to their technology being commonplace. This approach, also used explicitly in such organisations as Philips in their Design Probes (2014), allows for the form and user engagement of therapeutic technologies to be prototyped prior to committing to a particular technology. The process intentionally reverses the traditional way of developing therapeutic technologies, in which the initial time and funding is committed to technology development with design only being considered at the end of the development process.

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The notion of envisioning future technologies has formed the basis for a number of public workshops I have facilitated. The first of these was held at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, Australia as part of Melbourne Now in 2014. Over the course of three days, the workshops engaged interested members of the public to contemplate possible forms for future medical technologies using a paper-based clay, which had the consistency of marshmallow. I grounded the process of developing the models on the seminal brainstorming text Applied Imagination, by Alex Osborn, first published in 1953. In Osborn’s (1979) “deliberate idea-finding”, he suggests that in order to deliberately increase the production of good ideas, the maker(s) must follow two key principles: defer judgement and quantity breeds quality. During the initial ideation phases of brainstorming, Osborn entreats the reader to focus on generating a proliferation of ideas, while withholding judgement about the value of those ideas. The notion of withholding judgement is critical to the success of the hands-on material brainstorming sessions as it helps to create a non-threatening atmosphere in which participants can workshop ideas for new technologies. Within the NGV workshop, I entreated participants to sit with me and create an organic micro-model without focusing on a preconceived outcome. This open-ended ideation process generated a plethora of prototypes, which together can be read as an aesthetic language for future technologies. In a similarly generative workshop titled Co-designing Our Wearable Health Technologies, conducted in 2016 at the Australian Design Centre (ADC) in Sydney with exhibition designer Kat Bond, participants were engaged to generate speculative technologies for realworld health issues.The propositions were communicated through small scale modelling and drawing. The workshop was structured around wearable technologies (hearing, diagnostic,

FIGURE 8.5 Members

of the public modelling future forms for medical devices using Magiclay, NGV Bolwell Edge Residency in connection with Melbourne Now, March 2014.

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drug delivery) and challenged participants to question what makes a good wearable health technology, and how can we improve or re-envision these devices. Each group focused on a number of health issues that they felt could be addressed through design. The ideas were prototyped and presented back to the group through demonstration and presentation, and included less invasive technologies to deal with Crohn’s disease, through to wearables to detect vitamin D levels. The models generated through these workshops form part of a growing archive of physicalised ideas that are focused on open-ended innovations that may be possible in the future, rather than representing what is possible now. The outcomes differ in their specificity, a result of the framing of the workshops. The NGV models are small, white, sponge-like forms that suggest potential forms for future devices and bio-signal sensing jewellery. The ADC brief was more specific and so the outcomes are less open-ended, instead providing tangible models for addressing real-world health issues in innovative and future-focused ways.

Iterative material-led approaches to making with next-generation materials The generative workshops described above facilitate material brainstorming at the group level, using low-tech materials to prototype high-tech ideas. When dealing with advanced materials, particularly nanotechnologies, I draw on a similar material-led brainstorming approach in which I work with the properties of the material at hand and am led by its opportunities and constraints to develop material – led works. Working with next-generation materials requires a kind of material empathy that is developed through ongoing testing and experimentation over a period of time. Nano-engineered materials, in particular, can be expensive, unpredictable and often messy. There are no substitute materials for magnetic liquids or shape change metals and it is only through experimenting with the actual materials in an iterative way, and understanding their opportunities and constraints, that one is able to generate compelling works. As Juhani Pallasmaa (2012) writes: “The skin reads the texture, weight, density and temperature of matter” (p. 81), a quote that underscores the need to get hands-on with the material in order to understand its properties and behaviours. During 2009 I was funded by the Australia Council to develop “Material Poetic”: creating a range of jewellery-scale artefacts with materials ‘at the extremes of the poetic spectrum’, including magnetic liquid that changes shape in the presence of magnetic field; electroluminescent materials; and shape change metals, which manipulate form when warmed. Through the project I had also hoped to develop jewellery from Aerogel (99.6% air) and carbon nanotubes (one of the strongest materials on earth). However, through material-led testing I found that these materials were near impossible to work with, carbon nanotubes need to be ‘grown’ in laboratory conditions and Aerogel (which is used as an insulation material on spacecraft) is so intensely brittle that it cannot be cut without exploding into fragments. Polarity (Figure 8.1) was born from the Material Poetic investigations and was a developed for installation in the 2012 National New Media Artist Award at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane.Through the project, I collaborated with a scientific glass blower, electronics experts, nano-technologists and scientists to actualise the work. The installation of Polarity involved a floating white plane, supported by a discrete black base, on which 24 delicate glass vessels were

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FIGURE 8.6 Models

created by members of the public during Heiss’s NGV Bolwell Edge Residency in connection with Melbourne Now, March 2014.

Photograph by Mina Carneli and Katrina Mulcahy

located. Each of the small aquariums was approximately 5cm in diameter and housed a small bubble of black liquid at its base, resembling balsamic vinegar in olive oil. In its natural state, the ferrofluid lay inert at the bottom of the vessels submerged in a layer of ethanol. Intermittently, a magnetic field caused the liquid to transform into an array of spikes as it realigned along the magnetic field lines. The impact of Polarity, despite its scientific heritage, is very organic – the black elements reminiscent of sea anemones that sway in rock pools at the beach, coming to life and going back to sleep with the invisible pulse of the magnetic field. Concealed within the plinth are rare earth magnets, electronics, motors and mechanisms, which activate the fluid. The invisibility of these mechanisms puts the onus back on the viewer to make sense of the experience they are involved in. Ferrofluid is a largely unknown material with unique physical and behavioural characteristics and its installation in this format engaged viewers emotionally, many were visibly concerned when the creatures stopped moving and relieved when they stirred again.

Wearables as a site for therapeutic investigation Throughout my practice, teaching and research I have an enduring interest in wearables as a site for therapeutic investigation. Use of the term wearables here incorporates jewellery but also textile structures worn close to the skin, hearing technologies worn behind the ear, and other body-oriented technologies. The wearable therapeutic projects developed through the

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practice eschew existing languages of disability and instead focus on designing and developing artefacts that people might wish to wear, their therapeutic capability becoming a secondary concern. With the intention of shifting aesthetics from disability to desirability I developed the earliest iterations of Diabetes Jewellery, in 2007.The earrings were clip-on flowers enabled with NanoMAPs to administer drugs through the back of the earlobe. It was envisaged that the bold and ornate earrings might be the jewellery of choice for a woman in her early eighties. This exercise in augmenting jewellery artefacts suggested a wearable that might confer status or social alignment whilst simultaneously administering insulin, or other required medications, to the blood stream. The shift from disability to desirability has a two-fold effect. First, as the jewellery artefacts have little or no external indication of their therapeutic function this helps to return the power of disclosure back to the wearer – to reveal the health function of the wearable or to leave it in the realm of personal artefact. Second, desire to wear the jewellery artefact, which becomes aligned with ones personal identity, may inadvertently increase compliance with drug regimes. This could confer a great benefit, particularly in populations in which uptake and compliance are inconsistent. In his article “Till Death Do Us Part: Jewellery and its Human Host”, Kevin Murray (1992) suggests that the jewellery artefact and its wearer are woven into a bi-directional contract in which the wearer does not have greater significance than the jewellery. Rather, the artefact has a rich inner life and will often outlive the wearer. He writes: “The question to ask of jewellery is not so much why people choose to wear it – a question which grants no status to the object outside of its usefulness – but why jewellery wears people.” Murray identifies a class of jewellery that is both functional and representational, for instance the security badge which is both ornamental and allows access to restricted spaces. Within this reading, Diabetes Jewellery is both a piece of adornment and the device keeping the wearer alive. The connection that people have with jewellery is far greater than material value but instead has more to do with memory and personal history, these artefacts connecting us through space and time with loved ones, with distant spaces and treasured memories. In augmenting jewellery artefacts with therapeutic technologies, we start to enlarge the sphere of the jewellery’s affect. Historically there are many examples of augmented jewellery artefacts – necklaces and cufflinks housing compasses, pillbox rings, and ‘neck kits’ for climbers that contain the vital elements for survival if all else is lost. Such augmented artefacts operate on a symbolic or practical (tools and techniques) level. However, within this emerging practice the potential impact of jewellery and other wearables on health and wellbeing is greatly enlarged as we consider ways of applying veneers of technology to personal artefacts so that they continue to function on an aesthetic level but also provide health-giving properties. Augmenting a wedding ring in this way would ensure that the existing emotional content was preserved while providing the ring with lifemaintaining capability. Wright, Wallace and McCarthy (2008) propose that the key to augmented jewellery remaining precious rather than being relegated to a gadget is to bring the making of the artefacts back to ideas of longevity and personal attachment rather than technology for technology’s sake. The authors suggest that, within their projects “this has been achieved though empathic engagement between maker and wearer and by the maker interpreting and reflecting personal significances in the form and function of the artifacts” (p. 18:20).

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Conclusion This practice differs from traditional object-based and product design practices by making empathy and human emotion central to the design process, both for final users and as a condition for working laterally across disciplines. Inhabiting the viewpoints and skill sets of collaborators has allowed me to navigate complexities in trans-disciplinary projects to achieve innovative outcomes, and develop new modes of practice. In addition to this focus on emotional frameworks, I have identified a number of emergent methodologies within the practice that facilitate innovation: idea proliferation in workshop contexts, material-led investigation, wearables as a site for therapeutic potential and embedded practice as a tool to augment creativity. In order to make compelling works between disciplinary boundaries I have developed specific ways of making that enable me to generate innovative ideas and see projects through to prototype or built form. Hands-on material brainstorming in group contexts is a key tool that I employ to generate vast quantities of potential forms for technology; while working in a material-led way with nanotechnologies and other next-generation materials allows me to develop the tacit knowledge required to manifest the technology in an appropriate form. The opportunity to be embedded within a range of scientific and organisational contexts has allowed for the development of works that are situated between art, design, science and technology and which, collectively, suggest new ways of engaging in trans-disciplinary contexts. The difference between a consultant model and an embedded model is the opportunity for sustained access to tools, technologies and expertise to feed into the creative process. This ongoing input elongates the creative process and arguably helps to create more human-focused outcomes. It is through these haptic and tactile approaches to materials, in tandem with an abiding commitment to producing emotionally relevant work for people in a trans-disciplinary way, that the practice has been able to develop a wide range of innovative projects. These projects are in various stages of production, some destined for galleries while others will hopefully save lives. However, they all contain within them the seed of ambition to design for a possible future rather than to be constrained by the present. It is through focusing on the potential of transdisciplinary practice to break apart traditional disciplinary boundaries and generate work for a future condition that creative practice in the present is positively changed.

Acknowledgements I thank Gandel Philanthropy for generously funding the Smart Heart project, St. Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne, The Nossal Institute for Global Health, Associate Professor Keely Macarow, Associate Professor Paul Beckett, Nanotechnology Victoria, Arts Victoria, The Australian Network for Art and Technology, The Australia Council, RMIT Centre for Materials Innovation and Future Fashion, Blamey Saunders hears, The Australian Design Centre and the National Gallery of Victoria.

Note 1 NanoMAP patches enable pain-free and continuous delivery of therapeutic drugs such as insulin in a convenient format. NanoMAPs are polymer patches with a diameter of 10mm and a thickness of 2mm, which have between 1000–10,000 microneedles on their surface. The drug is incorporated by either coating it directly onto the external surface of the patch or through direct inclusion into the polymer matrix.

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References Avenel-audran, M., A. Goossens, E. Zimerson, and M. Bruze. ‘Contact Dermatitis from Electrocardiograph-monitoring Electrodes: Role of P-Tert-butylphenol-formaldehyde Resin’. Contact Dermatitis 48, no. 2 (2003): 108–111. Barr, Jane Ellen. ‘Skin Matters: Impaired Skin Integrity in the Elderly | Ostomy Wound Management Volume 52 – Issue 5 – May, 2006’. Accessed 27 March 2017. www.o-wm.com/content/ impaired-skin-integrity-elderly. Depraz, N. ‘The Husserlian Theory of Intersubjectivity as Alterology: Emergent Theories and Wisdom Traditions in the Light of Genetic Phenomenology’. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, no. 5–6 (1 May 2001): 169–78. Gethmann, C. F. Interdisciplinary Research and Trans-Disciplinary Validity Claims. Ethics of Science and Technology Assessment. Berlin: Springer International Publishing, 2014. Heiss, L., and S. Morgan. ‘Therapeutic Collaborations: Informing the Development of Therapeutic Nanotechnologies Through Creative Practice’. Second Nature: International Journal of Creative Media 2, no. 1 (2010): 198–220. Konya, Chizuko, Hiromi Sanada, Junko Sugama, Mayumi Okuwa, Yuki Kamatani, Gojiro Nakagami, and Kozue Sakaki. ‘Skin Injuries Caused by Medical Adhesive Tape in Older People and Associated Factors’. Journal of Clinical Nursing 19, no. 9–10 (1 May 2010): 1236–42. Moore, Susan M., Naomi J. Hackworth,Victoria E. Hamilton, Elisabeth P. Northam, and Fergus J. Cameron. ‘Adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes: Parental Perceptions of Child Health and Family Functioning and Their Relationship to Adolescent Metabolic Control’. Health and Quality of Life Outcomes 11 (22 March 2013): 50. Murray, Kevin. ‘Till Death Do Us Part: Jewellery and Its Human Host’. Kitezh, 1992, p. 5. Accessed 15 March 2014. www.kitezh.com/texts/tildeath.html Osborn, Alex F., and Lee Hastings Bristol. Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative Thinking. 3rd Revised edition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979. Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. 3rd edition. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Philips Design. ‘Philips Design Probes’. Accessed 29 May 2014. www.90yearsofdesign.philips.com/ article Reddy, Madhuri. ‘Skin and Wound Care: Important Considerations in the Older Adult’. Advances in Skin & Wound Care 21, no. 9 (2008): 424–436. doi:10.1097/01.ASW.0000323547.12358.b8. Thompson, Evan. ‘Empathy and Human Experience’. In Science, Religion, and the Human Experience, edited by James D. Proctor, 261–286. Oxford University Press, 2005. www.oxfordscholarship.com/ view/10.1093/0195175328.001.0001/acprof-9780195175325-chapter-14. Timms, N., and L. Lowes. ‘Autonomy or Non-Compliance in Adolescent Diabetes?’ British Journal of Nursing (Mark Allen Publishing) 8, no. 12 (24 July 1999): 794–797, 800. Wright, Peter, Jayne Wallace, and John McCarthy. ‘Aesthetics and Experience-Centered Design’. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 15, no. 4 (December 2008): 18:1–18:21. Zimetbaum, Peter, and Alena Goldman. ‘Ambulatory Arrhythmia Monitoring: Choosing the Right Device’. Circulation 122, no. 16 (19 October 2010): 1629–1636.

9 A FINGER POINTING AT THE MOON Absence, emptiness and Ma in design Yoko Akama

It is hard to write about any connotations of ‘absence’ without negating the subject in English. For example, im-perceptible, un-touchable or non-existence uses the prefix (italicised) in a binary way to denote an opposite quality of perceptible, touchable, existence. Similarly, in Undesign the editors provoke us to consider ‘undoing’, ‘unpicking’, ‘unraveling’, where again the prefix ‘un-’ is deployed in a binary way to reverse, remove or rethink a pre-existing conception of design. In other words, there is already an a priori of design in our discourse, education and practice that is called upon to be dismantled, questioned or inversed. Many argue that this a priori of design is defined and dominated by its European and north-western origins to ‘better’ the world according to progress and development (Akama & Yee 2016; Bousbaci 2008; Keshavarz 2015). But there are also ‘designs with other names’ (Salazar & Borrero 2017) that have been shaped by practices and philosophies elsewhere, and I speak to these through a sensitivity to absence. I start with absence as the basis of our discussion that is not defined by its oppositional quality to presence, to foreground designing that has evolved alongside spiritual and intellectual developments in Taoism, Shinto and Zen Buddhism. Such philosophies of absence evolved heterogeneously over thousands of years through various artists, poets, scholars, monks and writers in India, China,Taiwan, Korea and Japan (Nishida in Dilworth et al., 1998), in contrast to and preceding European modern thought. When we turn to philosophies of absence, we see how they take nonbeing or nothingness as the ground for being. Kimura’s (2004) translation of Lao Tzu’s well-known poem of nothingness (Wu) expresses this well: Thirty spokes share a hub; The usefulness of the cart lies in the space where there is nothing. Clay is kneaded into a vessel; The usefulness of the vessel lies in the space where there is nothing. A room is created by cutting out doors and windows; The usefulness of the room lies in the space where there is nothing. While the material contains utility, the immaterial contains essence. The empty centre of a wheel allows the spokes to function, and the usefulness of a bowl lies in its empty space so it could receive content. An orientation that foregrounds absence or emptiness is significantly different to one that privileges a subject-centred view.

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Henri Bortoft (1996), a philosopher of science, describes how structures of language like English institutionalise the active, subject-centred mode. Like the opening example, this is why absence in English can only be defined as a negation or removal of the subject. From a developmental psychology perspective, Bortoft explains how infants in a receptive mode gradually develop the action mode through their education, language and interaction with their physical environment. They learn how to recognise and distinguish one thing from the other through a focus on boundaries to discriminate, analyse and divide the world up into objects. However, the receptive orientation emphasises holistic, non-verbal, nonlinear and intuitive perception. It is being open to events as they happen, and to take in and work with what is, rather than manipulating the environment by imposing the subjective ‘I’. In order to shift this orientation, Bortoft (1996, 17) explains, [t]his turning around, from grasping to being receptive, from awareness of an object to letting an absence be active, is a reversal which is the practical consequence of choosing the path which assents to the whole as nothing and not mere nothing. This receptive mode is explored in this essay by weaving in various philosophies of absence. This orients my designing with communities, and my practice has been shaped by working with regional communities in Australia to help strengthen their resilience for disaster preparedness and with Indigenous Nations to enact their sovereignty and self-determination. It is important to note that this context is central in defining my practice, as well as informing what I share here. These are drawn upon in this discussion to deepen a meta-level discussion of the relevance and potential of absence that aims to contribute to the concerns and sentiment of Undesign.

A philosophy of absence A philosophy of absence is practiced in Japanese architecture, and is seen in Shinto shrines, tearooms, Zen gardens, which readers in design may be more familiar with through Tadao Ando’s Church of Light that ‘creates a space of nothingness’ (Ando in Baek 2009, 195). Rather than absence as minimalism that is a removal of form, which takes the object-centred or subject-centred ontology as a priori, Ando relates his work to the Japanese tearoom where he explains that its importance ‘does not lie in the walls, floor, ceiling, but the space of ma surrounded by these elements . . . and concerned with what kind of kokoro will be accommodated within this space of nothingness’ (ibid). The Church of Light is a space of Ma, for ‘the deep awakenings of the self ’ in the kokoro (mind-heart-soul) of the participants. This sense of Ma (間) resonates with Lao Tzu’s poem where the immaterial is considered as essence and the material helps to support and give shape to it. Likewise, the cross cut out from the wall is not an absence of form, but it is emptiness filled with light, ‘altering with passage of time, demanding from the perceiver at each moment a different emotional, intellectual and spiritual response’ (in Baek 2009, 196). I jump off from Ando’s example as a necessary way to connect readers to familiar examples of design informed by Ma (間), to progress a discussion on absence, emptiness, receptiveness and between-ness. These absence-like qualities have meaning only if we can step aside from a conditioning that privilege action, making and doing, as we often see emphasised in the verb

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designing. Echoing Bortoft, design’s dominant orientation is one that is object-centred, which are being manipulated by the imposition of the subject. What if we foreground or practice design that is passive, formless and receptive? I invite the reader into my world-view as a Japanese designer and researcher to begin a conversation where concepts like ‘emptiness’, ‘nothingness’ and ‘surrender’ need not be interpreted nihilistically as it is commonly understood. These concepts will become more evident as I progress through this chapter. I also ask the reader to suspend judgements of seeing the discussion here as a ‘West’ versus ‘East’ dualism, or to consider the philosophies introduced as ‘oriental’, exotic or superior. My writings have been received and criticised in such ways before, which is an unfortunate consequence of simplification and detachment. The discussion I pursue here is not suggested as undesign to reverse, remove or counteract the a priori of design, since I am side-stepping the very idea of binaries. Instead, I come from the position of plurality and contradiction, informed by an ecological world-view where things that seem oppositional are in fact inter-dependent. Like day and night, life and death, these are fluid and continuous. Similarly, Lao Tzu’s poem helps us see into the interfusion of being and nonbeing: ‘Being does not remain as such, nor does nonbeing.They are always ready to change from one state to the other. This is the ‘fluidity’ of things. . . . But as soon as his mind ‘stops’ with either of them, it loses its own fluidity’ (in Suzuki 1958, 158). Taking this into design, its dominant discourse and practice has fixed one state of design as a priori, and Ma can usefully give attention to invisible things and ‘denies the position of a fixed subject and drives it into a state of flickering’ (Isozaki in Davidson 1991, 66). Despite vastly different origins and routes of evolution, my ambition is to weave various discourses in feminism, phenomenology, post-colonial theory and cultural philosophy with Ma in the hope that the reader finds some resonance with related ideas of their own. Ma is co-ontological. I am also an in-between person, being Japanese by birth and upbringing, educated in England and Japan and currently working in Australia. Migration of people, whether by economical, political or social reasons is increasing. Being multi-local (Selasi 2014) has enabled me fluidity and ways to embrace heterogeneous world-views. Ma had always been a constant presence in my life and therefore my design practice, but I never felt the legitimacy to foreground Ma, or indeed my Japanese heritage in my research writing until recently (since 2012). This reflects a feeling of illegitimacy that many non-Western people feel who live and work among a dominant group that is always taken as a point of reference (Minh-Ha 1989). The same could be said about design, and owing to my education and industry experience in design in the UK, US and Australia, I have been institutionalised as a designer and researcher to background my heritage, and instead, foreground the gaze of the dominant. However, I could never disguise my Japanese-ness in my name, mannerisms, poor English grammar and physical features whose characteristics stand out through mere juxtaposition outside of Japan. Like finding the other half of a well-loved glove, lost at the back of the clothes drawer, my Japanese heritage has been valuable to renew. It is a strong presence that brings forth a different consciousness and a mode of being as a designer and researcher. As such, I am taking tentative steps of inscribing myself strongly into my papers to account for positionality, culture and background that shape my practice rather than a deletion of these stances. Omission of the authors’ positionality, which characterises majority of design research reporting, is an unfortunate reinforcement of defaulting to ‘normative’ readings and representations of design/ers.

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Ma and design Ma is a profound philosophy of considerable depth, and my papers on Ma (2012, 2014, 2015) is an attempt, each time, to layer further understanding. Approximate translation of Ma is ‘between-ness’ or ‘in-between’, also used interchangeably by other scholars. Ma has subjective and objective dimensions that range in substantial scale. One end is objective, literal and tangible, which is a familiar place to start for readers in design who may already know about Japanese traditional performance (eg. Noh theatre), martial arts (eg. Aikido, Kendo), film (eg. by Ozu Yasujiro, Hirokazu Koreeda) and architecture (eg. Arata Isozaki, Tadao Ando) where Ma features strongly. The spatial orientation of Ma is a strong presence in Japanese houses, for example, manifesting as reconfigurable spaces by sliding semi-opaque doors and screens. Corridors and entrances link inside and outside, blurring such boundaries. This is Ma as an interstice, a gap, an opening. This is seen in the character of Ma, composed of a light shining through the gaps in the shutters (Figure 9.1). Ma is also seen in visual composition in the use of white space. The sparseness of brushstrokes of a fishing boat in the midst of rippling waters awakens, in the mind of the beholder, ‘a sense of the vastness of the sea and at the same time of peace and contentment’ (Suzuki 1958, 22). Absence of marks is important as much as their presence, and it is this very absence that evokes imagination, to create an encounter in-between the author, material and audience. Ma also features in music or performance as an interval, a break, and a pause, which gives it a dramatic quality. Ma is expressed by the very absence of colour, sound or movement, accentuating our awareness of totality (Suzuki,2004). Richard Pilgrim (1986, 259), a scholar of art and religion in Japan, refers to this Ma as ‘pregnant nothingness’. Readers in art, design and many creative practices will be familiar with this absent-centred awareness. It is not unique to Japanese culture and it can be found in many artistic expressions around the world, even though there is no exact word for Ma in English. The other end of the scale is more complex to describe and understand because it is socially and culturally constructed. This Ma is tacit and ambiguous, applying to who and how we are with others.The comical ways in which name-cards are exchanged in business settings when two people meet and the subtle ways one can demonstrate respect for one another, indicates the social and relational complexity of Ma in Japan. Tetsuro Watsuji (1996) a seminal Japanese philosopher, explains that the word ‘human beings’ is composed of two characters,

FIGURE 9.1 Composition

of the character of Ma – a light shinning between shutters

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‘person’ (人) and ‘between’ (間) – a ‘between person’. He describes that each person’s identity is integrally related to that of others, encompassing the public, the social and the communal. This notion of human beings have much in common with philosophies that situates humanity in communal and ecological terms (Gibson et al., 2015). The Japanese etymology of a human being as ‘between person’ acknowledges inter-dependence, not independence or individualism. Colloquial phrases like ‘Ma o nakusu’, ‘Ma ga nai’ or ‘Ma ga warui’, is used when someone has lost, have little or poor Ma as ‘between-ness’. These phrases are expressed in situations when someone is talking loudly on the phone in public, discarding rubbish on the street, or is unable to read silence, timing and gestures that indicate a lack of respect and consideration of their social and environmental context. Again, this is not unique to Japanese language or culture, and many people could sense this Ma when reading meaning into silence to intuit things that are not said, or to calibrate a comfortable and appropriate politeness with a stranger. These examples give another meaning to Ma as a heightened relational sensitivity as ‘between-ness’ or ‘in-between’. These are not expressed explicitly, so we must heighten our senses towards such ‘in-betweens’. The plurality of Ma’s variable meanings are also its potency and fascination for those who have explored Ma in their practice (see Takahashi & Kimura 2000). It is important to note that Ma is embedded in practice and is co-ontological. It cannot be understood purely as abstract theory, conceptual framework or philosophy, which troubles dominant conventions of transporting and applying knowledge across contexts. This, ironically, highlights the limitation of my writing because Ma needs to be experienced and practiced for Ma to have any meaning, echoing Taoism, Shinto and Zen Buddhism as spiritual philosophies that evolved alongside it. However, as it will become evident, I am merely using Ma as a reminder to heighten and attune us to intangible and intuited countenance of designing that we are already familiar with, yet are often overlooked when design emphasises methods, techniques, process, objects and outcomes alone. This kind of design tends to selectively highlight agency, action and isolate intentional interventions, and in turn, omits noticing of silent, formless, passive and non-active dimensions that are entangled with its context.These dimensions constitute design as well as conditions of designing, and Ma is a sensitivity to such things. Ma can orientate design towards a fluidity of being and nonbeing, emplacing us in emergence, serendipity and impermanence. Ma is co-ontological, where one no longer sees the self or subject as the epicentre of knowledge. The singular ‘I’ does not precede the relation of ‘we’ (Nancy 2000), which recognises the between-ness that emerges among heterogeneity and we all become with, among relational ecologies of beings and non-beings (Watsuji 1996). I speak of designing across boundaries as a condition of my existence, and this is a way of being inbetween moments, spaces, people and dimensions, reminding us that we are always in the ‘middle of things’ (Bhabha 2006) where distinctions are made blurry. Categories that aim to distinguish subject-object, designer-user and human and non-human can inadvertently compartmentalise such associations into objects for design. Instead, Ma collapses distinctive worlds and deconstructs all boundaries (Pilgrim 1986). Due to length, only brief fragments from my practice weave through each section to bring specificity and illustration of Ma as a way to propose what undesign could be. Extensive accounts of the project and context can be read in the published works cited in participatory design and co-design (e.g. see Akama 2015; Light & Akama 2012).

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Grasp bird’s tail: Ma as relational sensitivity My practice evolved and matured through various confronting and challenging encounters of working with various regional communities and emergency management agencies for bushfire preparedness in Australia. Fires are a continuing threat in Australia, intensified by global warming and extreme climatic changes (Hughes & Steffen 2013). My work in this area spans between 2009 and 2013, and our team began saturating ourselves in the issues by feeling our way through, spending time with residents, visiting high-risk, fire-prone localities to become embodied conduits and to share our learning with others. As reported in Light and Akama (2012), this work revealed different levels of vulnerability to fire, for example, how communities were feeling disempowered from years of being told what to do from the fire authorities; the residents’ varying level of awareness of risk in relation to their geographical environment; fragmentation of community networks and the enormous task of overcoming social and mind-set barriers for preparedness. Doubt, fear and confusion was rife, and our team quickly realised that it was not a simple process of engaging a coherent and motivated group to be prepared. If design is an agent of change, as argued by many, what can design do here to ‘start, boost, support, make robust and replicate social innovation’ (Manzini & Rizzo 2011, 202)? Or, is this view of design too causal, linear, simplistic and isolated, which comes from its active, external, affirmative orientation? Our team began recruiting residents for a series of workshops to co-design awareness and understanding, and catalyse connections among neighbours as a form of collective preparedness. Co-design workshops are often highly structured and its documentation and reporting share visible interventions where again tools, methods, techniques and approaches are prioritised over a focus on nuanced, relational interactions that occur and shape moments of intervention. Light and Akama (2012) draw attention to imperceptible inter-subjective nuances and describe how the process of facilitation is centrally immersed within, and emerge from, very complex relational dynamics of participants, place and condition. ‘A chance word may bring in or redirect an uncertain participant, changing the group, the interaction and the outcome in unpremeditated ways. . . . These small moments impact on the design that emerges and help decide it’ (ibid, 69). Neither the participant nor the facilitators are ‘neutral’ in these encounters – they come already with embodied memory, experience and expectations as a condition of their engagement. In an emotionally charged workshop where there is varying degrees of apathy, fear, distrust and confusion, these undoubtedly shape the process and outcomes of designing. This attuning is Ma and it is sensitive to tones, pauses, silences and atmospheres that are haptic, visceral and intuited. Designing with people employs affective dimensions. Someone’s fear and confusion needs to be sensed.Tension in a room has to be felt and these are the ‘materials’ we work with.These liminal, ambiguous ‘small moments’ are ‘messy’ and hard to verify in our narrow instruments of observing and reporting. However, it is precisely in these nuanced and silent moments that transformation is taking place, hidden from view by their very nature of being internal, layered, ephemeral and dispersed. As I have noted elsewhere (2015, 262), ‘As we design, we are embedded within and inscripted by conditions that we cannot quite touch or see visibly, yet manifests through its evolution’. I see these as passive and formless ‘absences’ that require a shift from subject-centred awareness towards receptiveness to sense what is not present, to heighten our awareness of totality. The harder one tries to grasp a bird’s tail, the faster the bird will fly away – the bird being a metaphor of air, spirit and breath.

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The contingent nature of designing with communities points to the greater unpredictability and constantly morphing power relations when working outside organisational settings. Heterogeneity and unbounded contexts indicates how participation needs to be considered in ways that are less direct, less literal, less visible and more complex. In participatory design, Di Salvo et al. (2013, 203) echo the evolving nature of designing where ‘needs emerge, design objects change, designers morph and the design process is continuously reconstructed by all interested publics’. This series of relations requires a designer to be able to attune and saturate in the emergent, to respond to the ‘small moments’ of inter-subjective nuances and to feel a way through (Light & Akama 2012). Heterogeneity also means that we account for and become aware that designing takes place ‘among beings and non-beings, systems and power, among places and atmospheres’ – that are all transforming together (Akama 2015, 262). Communities who choose to live in fire-prone environments deal with conflicting priorities that manifest by rubbing up, colliding with or falling out of cracks. These manifestations are often hidden, distributed or emerge unexpectedly, and despite our desire to co-ordinate and intervene in its articulation, it may not be the purview of a designer. From this perspective, we need to acknowledge the tempestuousness of change and be ready to immerse in its flow, emergence and turbulence. This way of designing in contingent and precarious contexts resonates strikingly with the way Bortoft (1996, 15) describes a receptive, responsive orientation and a sensitivity to the whole ‘absence’ of a play. Actors do not stand away from a part as if it were an object. They enter into a part in such a way that they enter into the play. . . . But actors do not encounter the play as an object of knowledge over which they can stand like the lines they learn. They encounter the play in their part as an active absence which can begin to move them. When this happens, an actor starts to be acted by the play, instead of trying to act the play. The origins of the acting becomes the play itself, instead of the actors subjective ‘I’.The actor no longer imposes himself or herself on the play as if it were an object to be mastered, but he or she listens to the play and allows himself or herself to be moved by it. In this way actors enter into their parts in such a way that the play speaks through them. This is how, their awareness being occupied with the lines to be spoken, they encounter the whole which is the play – not as an object but as an active absence. Valuable parallels can be drawn here since designers are often well equipped with methods and roles to perform like actors with a script. Yet, there is significant difference between a design orientation to master, impose, stand apart from context, compared to one where the context moves through, act upon and designs the designer, like an actor acted by the play. Likewise, ‘encountering the whole . . . as an active presence’ resonates with an absenceorientation of Ma.

A wave in the ocean: Ma as being and becoming in between-ness Since 2014, my work alongside Indigenous nations to strategise self-determination involves confronting Australia’s colonial history of Indigenous cultural extinction in the denial of formal nation recognition by Australian government. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) peoples are sovereign and they have never ceded their land, rights or identity. This

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fact is a necessary foundation for Indigenous recognition and self-determination in order to build mutual respect between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, and to avoid being caught or claimed within a colonial construct (Behrendt 2003). Indigenous nation building1 is defined as ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ capacity for self-governance and self-determined economic development’ (Gooda 2014, 112), but this is a highly political, emotional and turbulent space. The challenges for Wiradjuri nation are especially complex for their territory is one of the largest on the Australian eastern seaboard. The Wiradjuri have experienced extensive dispersal of its citizens through forced relocation and the establishment of numerous missions.The considerable size of their Country makes it difficult in cohering and mobilising a nation, which is further compounded by a large Wiradjuri diaspora who live ‘off country’ in major cities like Sydney and Melbourne. As a way to catalyse, scaffold and promote necessary discussions of self-governance, sovereignty, cultural renewal and political identity, several Wiradjuri-led events, on and off their Country, are being initiated (see Akama et al., 2017). Our design and media team have been invited to create a variety of materials and processes as ‘in-betweens’ to foster respect, connection and renewal among Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. For such engagements, various human, material and immaterial dimensions configure as designing towards creating a respectful meeting place that accepts multiple Indigenous and non-Indigenous citizenships of a person. These include meetings in private where Elders of different Nations follow cultural protocols to obtain permission for Wiradjuri events to occur on Kulin Nation land, as a matter of law. Some gatherings have taken place on Country near the banks of the Murrumbidgee – a river of significance for the Wiradjuri – that gave a rhythm and flow to the activities like sharing a meal enveloped by the warm river breeze or going for a walk among the eucalypt and squawk of the cockatoos. When an Elder and master weaver, Aunty Lorraine Tye, teaches weaving at such gatherings, she is not just passing on knowledge and methods. These occasions also become moments of connection and rediscovery for a dispersed Nation. This confluence and welcoming of many manifests powerfully through weaving, according to Aunty Lorraine; ‘weaving is about gathering, connecting and healing, then there’s the importance of the string we weave . . . it’s about reeds combining, to make something stronger’. Weaving with reeds collected from the river is an act of emplacement, and becomes an embodied movement and material manifestation of Wiradjuri sovereign practice. An endless list of heterogeneous elements – weather, birds, law, social media, trees, sketches, website, atmosphere, e-mails, discussions, coffee, video, walks, knowledge, meals, affect, time, reeds, weaving, etc. – participate in designing the mediating structures of all our engagements. Again, we cannot impose our intentions upon such structures, because we are already entangled and constituted by these elements. Ma attunes my sensitivity to these to sense and work with each and all.This also means I avoid imposing, analysing, categorising and standing apart from these through a priori of design. Some might call what I do as deep listening, ethnography or Indigenous-led research, but it goes further because to me, it is co-ontological. Ma is becoming in-between to re-awaken our inter-relatedness. This changes the very nature of those involved, when each surrenders parts of its own nature in becoming a relational whole (Bortoft 1996; Kasulis 2002). Ma as between-ness situates us in this inter-relatedness as we all transform and become with one another (Akama 2015). Within this work, there are also confronting challenges, for example, when self-identification and activism for solidarity comes with an asserted assumption that ‘those-who-are-not-us can never understand who we are’ (Kasulis 2002, 5). I am non-Indigenous (which again is an unfortunate way the term negates the subject), and this obvious fact can surface in dualistic

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oppositions as ‘them versus us’ as a constant reminder of battling against hegemonic forces of the colonial legacy. These are glimpsed as anger, frustration and struggles of continual injustice; tension and anxiety between ‘white’ and ‘black’; hope, excitement and empowerment of participating in cultural practices and renewal. Among these layered, plural and complex in-betweens, Ma is also about aliveness in such moments. I am already entangled, not only because I am invited to this work as a design researcher, but also because I live in Australia. As a Japanese woman, foregrounding inter-relatedness is central to the notion of human being (人間) where the person (人) cultivates their betweenness (間) (Watsuji 1996). So this is fundamentally about co-existence, of sharing place of dwelling, and attending to my consciousness of being in sovereign relationships with Indigenous Nations. Living with and within colonial systems shapes us all, yet our different cultures are foregrounded in our engagements. Curiosity and openness shown to me when meeting new people comes in questions about who ‘my mob’ and culture is, almost like a ritual, to accept and work across difference to build relationships. Ma locates us at the interstices of being (Pilgrim 1986).

Light shining through shutters: Ma as emptiness and surrender The a priori of design celebrates a future orientation, seen in Herbert Simon’s popular quote of design ‘as courses of action aimed at changing existing situations, into preferred ones’ (1968, 55). The desire to change situations ‘into preferred ones’ is future-focused, and some argue that while this is based on innocent notions of making things ‘better’, it nonetheless ‘encourages design to actively attempt to forecast the future, through its administration, simulation and ultimately, manipulation’ (Keshavarz & Patchineelam 2016, 1). Rather than being future-oriented, Ma collapses the linearity of time and space to attune us to potential of what is ‘not there’. Emptiness is this potentiality, according to a Japanese graphic designer Kenya Hara (2011, 28), like the empty bowl ‘existing in a transitional state, waiting for the content that will eventually fill it; and this creative perspective instills power in the emptiness’. This means that Ma is to sense emergence and possibility by heightening aliveness and further engagement with the moment. This inflects its Zen Buddhist orientation to take us to the ‘edge of all processes of locating things by naming and distinguishing’ because these are ‘mind-created constructs and orders imposed on the chaos of experience’ (Pilgrim 1986, 256–257). Of all the various interpretations, experiences and practices of Ma discussed in this chapter, this is its defining character of ‘between-ness’ and ‘in-between’ constituted by emptiness. The light shining through the gap in the shutters (Figure 9.1) is not just a physical description of Ma. It also alludes to our capacity to observe emptiness or absence in the world around us and cultivate emptiness within ourselves to strip off ‘all the artificial wrappings humanity has devised, supposedly for its own solemnization’ (Suzuki 1958, 271). The mind only trained to analyse, ‘in spite of its practical usefulness . . . goes against our effort to delve into the depths of being’ (ibid). This reminds us that as we design, we are also being transformed through designing, and we are also designed by our environment to become part of the world’s continual transformation (Ingold 1993; Willis 2006). In being part of this circular movement of transforming and being transformed, requires surrender – a surrender of mindconstructed orders, a surrender of the desire to impose, and a surrender of self. Like an empty bowl that surrenders its contents in anticipation of what it might receive, Ma is our capacity for emptiness to enable a light to shine through, for awe and wonderment to permeate, by surrendering parts of our own nature in becoming a relational whole.

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As expressed eloquently by Pablo and Alfredo (Salazar & Borrero 2017, 3) in an epistolary article, we must ‘allow for our practices to be permeated by other ways of being in the world, other ontologies and epistemologies different to the ones that we know and inhabit. In this way, designs with other names is not understood as an opposing category to design, but as a call to question and expand the ways in which it operates’. Many other post-colonial scholars like Homi Bhabha (1984) have taught us to produce ‘slippage’, ‘excess’, and ‘difference’ to resist conformity. Undesign, while being a binary suggestion to reverse, remove or counteract the a priori of design, perhaps we could foreground plurality and contradiction to remind us all that we are part of an ecology where things that seem oppositional are in fact inter-dependent.Taken all together, this captures what I propose what undesign could be. This means when designing, it is to be present in moments of no-action and passive responsiveness; it is attuning and sensitising to invisible countenances; emplacing us all in emergence, serendipity and impermanence as all transforming in the world’s continual becoming. If the a priori of design already emphasises form, Ma is the between-ness of being (form) and nonbeing/emptiness (formlessness) as cycles and fluidity of life itself. This brings awareness to the invisible forces and influences that shape us in the flux and flow – like a river that is shaped by many forces.Yet the structures we design, materially and conceptually, to inhabit and make sense of this world are significant, only if we remember that they are just an index finger pointing at the moon. This is a Zen Buddhist teaching to remind us to see the holistic grandness of light (moon) and not confuse the texts that instruct or action of changing phenomena as ‘real’. Ma helps us to remember the totality of the world that includes the finger that points to the moon, and that we are continually becoming through this relationality.

Note 1 Indigenous nationhood in the absence of recognition: Self-governance strategies and insights from three Aboriginal communities is a Australian Research Council funded three year research project (2014–2017) that brings together three Aboriginal nations (Gunditjmara from Victoria, Ngarrindjeri from South Australia and individuals and groups from the Wiradjuri in NSW) with Australian and international academic researchers from seven universities. (See www.uts.edu.au/research-and-teaching/ourresearch/jumbunna/our-research/projects/nation-building-project). Indigenous nation building in Australia has been founded on the work, led by Stephen Cornell and Josepth Kalt of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development and the Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona. (See http://hpaied.org/publications-and-research, and http://nni.arizona.edu/ programs-projects/what-native-nation-building).

References Akama,Y 2012, ‘A “way of being”: Zen and the art of being a human-centred practitioner’, Design Philosophy Papers, vol. 1, pp. 1–10. Akama,Y 2014, ‘Attuning to Ma (between-ness) in designing’, paper presented to Participatory Design Conference, Windhoek, Namibia. Akama,Y 2015, ‘Being awake to Ma: Designing in between-ness as a way of becoming with’, Journal of Co-Design, vol. 11, no. 3–4, pp. 262–274. Akama,Y, Evans, D, Keen, S, McMillan, F, McMillan, M & West, P 2017, ‘Designing digital and creative scaffolds to strengthen indigenous nations: Being Waradjuri by practising sovereignty’, Journal of Digital Creativity, no. Special Issue on Digital Citizenship, pp. 1–15.

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Akama, Y & Yee, J 2016, ‘Intimacy and integrity in designing for social innovation’, Proceedings of Cumulus Conference, Hong Kong, pp. 173–180. Baek, J 2009, Nothingness:Tadao Ando’s Christian Sacred Space, Routledge, London. Behrendt, L 2003, Achieving Social Justice: Indigenous Rights and Australia’s Future, Sydney, Australia: The Federation Press. Bhabha, H 1984, “Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse,” Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis, vol. 28, no. Spring, pp. 125–133. Bortoft, H 1996, The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way of Science, Floris Books, New York. Bousbaci, R 2008, ‘ “Models of Man” in Design Thinking: The “Bounded Rationality” Episode’, Design Issues, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 38–52. Davidson, C (ed.) 1991, Anyone, Anyone Corporation, Rizzoli International Publications, New York. Dilworth, D. A.,Vigielmo,V. H., & Zavala, A. J 1998, ‘Chapter one Nishida Kitaro’, in Sourcebook for Modern Japanese Philosophy: Selected Documents, eds. DA Dilworth,VH Vigielmo, & AJ Zavala, Greenwood Press, Westport, USA, pp. 1–20. DiSalvo, C, Clement, A & Pipek, V 2013, ‘Communities: Participatory Design for, with and by Communities’, in Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design, eds. J Simonsen & T Robertson, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 182–209. Gibson, K., Rose, D. B., & Fincher, R (eds.) (2015), Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene. Brooklyn and New York: Punctum books. Gooda, M 2014, ‘Social Justice and Native Title Report’, Australian Human Rights Commission. Hara, K 2011, White, Zurich, Switzerland: Lars Müller. Hughes, L. and Steffen,W 2013,‘Be Prepared: Climate Change and the Australian Bushfire Threat, Climate Council of Australia’, www.climatecouncil.org.au/uploads/c597d19c0ab18366cfbf7b9f6235ef7c.pdf Ingold, T 1993, “The Temporality of the Landscape”, World Archaeology vol. 25, pp. 152–174. Kasulis,T 2002, Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophical and Cultural Difference, University of Hawaii Press, Hawaii. Keshavarz, M 2015, ‘Design-Politics Nexus: Material Articulations and Modes of Acting’, NORDES2015: Design Ecologies, Stockholm, Sweden, vol 6. Keshavarz, M & Patchineelam, V. 2016, ‘Design and the Politics of Fear: An Auto-Ethnography on Design Education’, Zontechnica, no. 2, pp. 1–8. Kimura,YG 2004, The Book of Balance: Lao Tzu’s Tao Teh Ching, Paraview, New York. Light, A & Akama, Y 2012, ‘The human touch: From method to participatory practice in facilitating design with communities’, paper presented to PDC, Roskilde, Denmark, Aug 12–16. Manzini, E & Rizzo, F 2011, ‘Small Projects/Large Changes: Participatory Design as an Open Participated Process’, Co-Design: International Journal of Co-Creation in Design and the Arts, vol. 7, no. 3–4, pp. 199–215. Minh-Ha, TT 1989, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis. Nancy, J.-L 2000. Being Singular Plural. Translated by R. D. Richardson and A. E. O’Byrne. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pilgrim, RB 1986, ‘Intervals (“Ma”) in Space and Time: Foundations for a Religio-Aesthetic Paradigm in Japan’, History of Religions, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 255–277. Salazar, PC & Borrero, AG 2017, ‘Letters South of (Nordic) Design’, Conference Proceeding of NORDES2017: Power and Design, Oslo, Norway, vol, 7. Selasi, T 2014, ‘Don’t ask where I’m from, ask where I’m a local’, accessed 12 December 2012, www. ted.com/talks/taiye_selasi_don_t_ask_where_i_m_from_ask_where_i_m_a_local/transcript?langua ge=en#t-12999. Simon, HA 1968, The sciences of the artificial, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Suzuki, DT 1958, Zen and Japanese Culture, Princeton University Press, New York. Suzuki, S (ed.) 2004, Eigo de hanasu ‘Nihon no kokoro’ (Keys to the Japanese Heart and Soul), Kodansha, Tokyo. Takahashi, H. & Kimura, K 2000. MA – Twenty Years On, Tokyo Geijutsu University. University Arts Museum, Tokyo. Watsuji, T 1996, Rinrigaku: Ethics in Japan, State University of New York Press, Albany. Willis, A-M 2006, ‘Ontological designing’, Design Philosophy Papers, no. 2, pp. 1–11.

10 HACKING THE SEMIOSPHERE The Ad Hoc Atlas: a manifesto as manifestation of undesign, V5.3: an exercise in reflexive (and recursive) design practice about design by design Joshua Singer

Singer, Map for Dérives of Visual (& Graphic) Landscapes [: & Interstices of Temporal Layers of Urban Surfaces] in “Ad-Hoc Atlas Version 2,Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin” (Detail of printed book), 2013.

FIGURE 10.1 Joshua

Good morning •

The world is not fixed. It changes and evolves. If we assume that the world is first our perceptions, informed (a posteriori) and subjective, then the world is not a complete thing, but an edited (or maybe designed) selection containing the bits of history, memory,

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•

•

•

•

stories, and images that we can picture in our mind. Our view of the world is not a complete picture but a constellation of the bits that, in aggregate (composed or designed), appear to make a whole.(Friedlander, 2008) The world, as we picture it, is a collection of things. Just as memories are selective and fallible and as we can edit and revise stories (redesign) for purpose and effect, this collection of things – in the past, present, and/or future – changes and evolves. If the world is a collection of things that create a picture in our mind, then we can assume that the world is not a place but a text (semiotically speaking) or maybe better yet, a discourse. More specifically, we can assume this is not exactly a discourse but a prototype continually changing and evolving through iteration in order to create (or design) a more up-to-date picture of the world. If the world is a constellation of texts that are forever changing and evolving that design a picture in our mind, then we can assume that the world is a fiction (but maybe not entirely.) An Ad Hoc Atlas is a collection of things (projects, books, editions, videos, essays, manifestos) that – whether in past, present, or future – change and evolve. Actually, it is not a collection of things but a text (semiotically speaking) or maybe better yet, a discourse and prototype continually changing and evolving through iteration in order to design a different picture of the world. An Ad Hoc Atlas is a fiction (but maybe not entirely.)

Singer, Ad-Hoc Atlas Version 2, Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin (Cover of printed book), 2013.

FIGURE 10.2 Joshua

Singer, Berlin Graphic Semiome: Google Image Search “Berlin” in “Ad-Hoc Atlas Version 2,Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin,” 2013.

FIGURE 10.3 Joshua

Image © Google Earth, Artistic collage courtesy of the author.

Singer, Samples of Elements of Graphic Semiomes of Design City Berlin in “AdHoc Atlas Version 2,Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin,” 2013.

FIGURE 10.4 Joshua

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Design is the solution to the problem of design •

In its conventional form, the business of graphic design produces cultural consciousness and functions as an apparatus for the continuation of the prevailing realistic-conformist mind. (Marcuse, 1979) • To the designer, to design is to solve problems.This preoccupation has led to the precarious occupation whereby one seeks problems to solve. (Perlroth, 2013) This is not for little purpose or necessarily ill effect. The pleasure and comfort we have (compare our existence to the poor souls living only 100 years prior) is by and large the end result of good design, from improvements in the tools we use (product design) and the knowledge we share (communication design.) • If we assume that the metabolisms of commerce rely heavily on the continual consumption of materials and services and that graphic design – the language system of the metabolism of the body culture that sends us the signals to this body (Bruinsma, 2012) that functions as an apparatus for the continuation of the prevailing realistic-conformist mind – then what kind of problems are we solving? • Graphic design is the music that gets culture in the mood. It is the soundtrack to the stories that are the world. • So •  . . . • There is the awkward silence that comes when we suddenly realize that good design might just be the same old song – the easiest yet sweetest tunes and the most sure to please – over and over, reinforcing the assimilated world in a feedback loop of its own design. This is one of design’s problems. • Needless to say, there are always alternatives. • We can design with only the best of intentions for a better, fairer, more humane world.

FIGURE 10.5 Joshua

Singer, Interchangeable-City-Surface-Modules_04 (video still), 2016.

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• •

We can abstain and design nothing. (Calvelli, 2011) If design, as an apparatus of culture, has a role in making the stories that are the world, then it has, as a powerful insider, the ability to change the stories. (Ambasz, 1972) New and unfamiliar songs offer alternatives to the ubiquitous soundtrack(s) of our world.

FIGURE 10.6 Joshua

Singer, Interchangeable-City-Surface-Modules_04 (video still), 2016.

FIGURE 10.7 Joshua

Singer, Interchangeable-City-Surface-Modules_04 (video still), 2016.

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Form and reform •

• •

•

The images we encounter in this world are not representations, or windows, or the scenery of our lives, but are parts of an ecology of texts that design (the perceptions of) our world.1 The images are not fixed or complete things, but edited (or maybe designed) containing the bits of history, memory, stories, and images forever changing and evolving. They are “pictures” in our mind, as we might say, that we can picture something in our mind (Friedlander, 2008). Texts, really. The majority of us live in a material landscape of complete artifice, a scarce few in the pastoral. Even when we walk through and view the pastoral material landscape, even though it is mediated from our perspective of the artificial (Dilnot, 2015), the view is mediated symbolically. Using the semiosphere2 as a framework, a systems and ecological view of semantic space, we could say that the world of reality is an open system, with positive inputs created by every new perception (and reading). This would be an overwhelming and un-navigable place with more signal than we could process, but by naming the world (its various parts) we close the system, the names acting as a negative input structuring and ordering the world making it comprehensible.3 We are continually navigating the world, experiencing signification that either supports the existing structure or challenges it in a process of shaping and reshaping, forming and reforming. a And now, we could say that within semantic cultural space, visual language (a subset within the larger and more general semiosphere: a semiome as a biome in the biosphere) structures the “open” world of reality into a “closed” world of visual “names.” (Lotman, 1978) Graphic design, in its normal forms of service, perpetuates the “closed” stabilizing system of language and conventional cultural consciousness, the cyclical process of using the known, or “the given,” to connect and convince continually reinforcing and reifying the known and the given. Graphic communication by way of images, symbols and glyphs, cultural consciousness/memory, and aesthetics (cultural signification by way of recognizable forms), names the world.

•

Graphic design as the language system of the metabolism of the body culture sings the same old songs and names the world. The same old songs comprise a closed system, a negative feedback loop, which circulates and reifies our common narratives.They homein4 on the narratives we are acclimated to – the mythologies that drive us – convincing us to consume, got to war, and other silly things.

Artifice and building pictures •

Artifice is the natural phenomenon of culture. Everything we make, everything that is not nature, is culture. Everything that is not nature is artifice. Everything that is culture is artifice. Artifice is not the untrue, but simply the constructed. a

•

Artifice and fiction are different, but not by a lot.

Language (a cultural mechanism, or maybe more appropriately a metabolism in the metabolism of culture) designs reality via artifice. Our perceptions of the world are artificial.

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• • • • • • •

•

To “picture” is to create a reality in the mind’s eye.The German word for picture is “bild” which shares its origins with “build.” To picture is to construct, to assemble. The mind understands its environment by assembling it or by “picturing.” A picture is an artificial version of the natural world. To “picture” is to build the world by artifice. We build the world picture by picture. Through artifice, graphic design structures the world of reality into a world of visual/ textual “names.” (Lotman, 2000) The texts “articulate” as in the articulation of the wrist, the slight of hand by turning and maneuvering. (Flusser and Cullars, 1995) Graphic design articulates the “real” into text/image and makes it artificial. The graphic components of cultural space, the graphic semiomes of the semiosphere, do not adorn, but rather picture (as in build) the world through images articulating the structure of the cultural sphere (a complex of interconnected and interdependent structure that is pervasive but not readily apparent) and creating an artificial version of the infinitely complex and unstructured real world. The texts (semiotically speaking) of graphic design “cast” artificial forms that picture the world, and build it by in-forming and reforming. If we consider the point that the “givens” (Marcuse, 1979) of culture – the normal things, the things we take for granted, the things we assume to be true – are used to inform and systematically reinforce themselves, and that design seems to have a bad habit of adding value for the sake of assimilation and consumption, and that by picturing the world we construct it, then what kind of world are we constructing? What then can we construct?

Singer, Diagram for Reading the Urban Semiospheric Metabolism in “Ad-Hoc Atlas Version 2,Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin,” 2013.

FIGURE 10.8 Joshua

Image © Google Earth, Artistic collage courtesy of the author.

Singer, Diagram for Reading the Urban Semiospheric Metabolism, (Detail of printed book) in “Ad-Hoc Atlas Version 2, Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin,” 2013.

FIGURE 10.9  Joshua

Image © Google Earth, Artistic collage courtesy of the author.

Singer, Illustrations of Semiosphere Modeling in “Ad-Hoc Atlas Version 2,Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin,” 2013.

FIGURE 10.10 Joshua

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FIGURE 10.11 Joshua

•

•

Singer, Malmö-Pixel-Test-01, 2014.

If it is all artifice, then the agents of the artifice or actors of its theatre could play the role of jester venturing beyond the norms of the given offering new pictures as a means to re-form. Design, as protagonist can either be complicit in continuing the given or create new pictures and break the spell of the articulated artificial world.

Undoing, undesigning •

If design is part of the problem, and to design is to solve problems, then can design solve (or at least absolve) its own problem by undesigning? Can it undo itself? • In the case of graphic design, undesign would seem to be an un-picturing; to undo the picture; to undo the intent of design; to undo conventions undoing their authority. • If design weaves our understanding of the world, structuring and constructing it, then by undesigning we would unravel the unquestioned naturalness of the (designed) world, reforming it in a way that reveals its artifice and as a consequence allows us to see that we have greater choices. • Well, maybe. • Undesign is at least critical.5 • x a

If design affixes the prefix “un” then it may not be design. This formative is not simply a negative, nor even a deconstruction, but an opposing force. Undesign is just another method of designing, but an antithetical method, reflexive and countering itself, continually shaping and reshaping, forming and reforming for the sole purpose of revealing the artificial.

Singer, Structural Model of the Graphic City in “Ad-Hoc Atlas Version 2,Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin,” 2013.

FIGURE 10.12 Joshua

Singer, Geographic Model of the Graphic City in “Ad-Hoc Atlas Version 2,Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin,” 2013.

FIGURE 10.13 Joshua

Singer, from Image Narratives: Layers & Annotations for New Spaces in “AdHoc Atlas Version 2,Vol 1 Including Montréal and Berlin” (Detail of printed book), 2013.

FIGURE 10.14 Joshua

FIGURE 10.15 Joshua

Singer, Modernism Test in Google Earth (Detail), 2013.

Image © Google Earth, Artistic collage courtesy of the author.

Hacking the semiosphere  133

Art is a hack6 •

•

Marcuse proposes that art can awaken us from a perpetual dream state of the conventions and mythologies of culture. The aesthetic form is critical in its ability to propose an alternative to an accepted reality “vis á vis ‘the given.’ ” and produces a counterconsciousness a“negation of the realistic-conformist mind”(Marcuse,1979,p. 9). A counterconsciousness acts as an antidote to a conventional consciousness, the perpetual and seamless dream state of a conventional culture and its representations. Art operates as a counter to our existing reality, offering new realities and thus brings to light context and specificities to what otherwise would be perceived as normal, or “the given.”(Marcues, 1979) It counters the effects of the given of culture by modifying (or hacking – more on this later) the world into different pictures.

-Or- undesign as destructive analysis •

•

If we assume that graphic design positions images, symbols, and glyphs, with the aid of style (cultural signification by way of recognizable forms) to craft and strategically direct meaning, and that the world is a collection images that pictures the world, then we can assume that graphic design, by positioning and structuring these culture signs, pictures new ideas. It makes knowledge. This knowledge can either reinforce or challenge the world, the given. Ungraphic design creates new knowledge (structures of pictures) by undoing cultural signs and pictures. It un-structures the pieces of culture. It unbinds the story.

FIGURE 10.16 Joshua

Singer, Test View in Google Earth for Image Narratives (“Homme”) (Detail),

2013. Image © Google Earth, Artistic collage courtesy of the author.

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FIGURE 10.17 Joshua

Singer, Test View of the Berlin Prosthethic Semiospheric Metabolic Reader Output,

2013. Image © Google Earth, Artistic collage courtesy of the author.

• •

•

After ungraphic design pulls the world (so to speak) apart, then what? Why not just let the pieces lay there, like a deconstructed puzzle? Undesign simply pulls apart and or scatters, not to deconstruct and analyze but rather to just leave it all there and let incongruity and serendipity allow new associations and new forms to emerge; to unravel and re-form as a means to reform, creating new groupings and associations (designing new structures) that if we choose to engage with (to read) produce meaning (like tea leaves.) If we take it a step further, to where deconstruction is the method and nothing more, its method then is to seek the inappropriate form that solves nothing (but maybe just says something worth saying.)

An Ad Hoc7 Atlas8 for the undesigning world •

• • • •

An atlas is a view of the world. It tells us where everything is, what it is composed of, and to whom it belongs. An atlas diecasts the world and gives it structure. It pictures the world and builds it. An atlas is also a fiction and artifice and that is convenient for these purposes. An Ad Hoc Atlas is a catalyst that is a biome that injects itself into the semiotic ecology (Lotman, Uspensky and Mihaychuk, 1978) of the world. An Ad Hoc Atlas is a catalyst9 for undesigning the world (semiotically speaking.) An Ad Hoc Atlas self-consciously understands that it has a place and an effect (however infinitesimal and immeasurable) in the semantic ecology and so its method is to hack, as a catalytic effect, the ecology. It hacks the semiosphere in order to modify it.

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•

Hacking the semiosphere is an act of undesign. To alter the semantic ecology by semantics is an undesign, an under-mining (undesign might be sub-designing, as a sub-version) of the complicit and assimilated methods of design. • An Ad Hoc Atlas undesigns by hacking. Modifying the “given” for the purpose of re-building/re-picturing. • An Ad Hoc Atlas uses undesign as a sub-version of the world by picturing (another) artificial world. • y • A joke is a revelation, the knowledge generated from the unexpected journey between incongruous nodes of information. • An Ad Hoc Atlas uses research to validate nonsense. It uses nonsense to validate nothing. It is not design as a solution to a problem. It designs problems. • An Ad Hoc Atlas is a theoretical conceptual research project about design disguised as an instrumental experimental methodological design research project. a b c • •

which explores the graphic semantic space and its multidimensional hierarchy of codes to undesign semantic space so we might understand that there is a semantic space.

[picture here] An Ad Hoc Atlas embraces the artifice of language for its ability to leave us untethered and disoriented and open to new vistas. For example: a b c d e f g

revealing theoretical landscapes proposing propositional geographies rendering invisible conceptual spheres hacking writings annotating historical and contemporary maps visualizing uncanny theories designing artifacts and constructing historical images of the urban landscape into cryptic tableau vivant of dialectic semantic spaces of the city.

• Well, maybe. • z

Notes 1 “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought” (Orwell, 1946). 2 Yuri Lotman’s theory of the semiotic continuum, the semiosphere (modeling itself on the biosphere) is a contained, self-regulating ecological system structured by language. Like the biosphere, it can be seen both as a whole and as an interconnected, interdependent, systemic complex; a semiotic organism of nested semiotic organisms. It is an ecology of signs. (Lotman et al., 1978). 3 In Lotman’s theory, the primary task of culture “is in structurally organizing the world around man . . .” with language functioning as a “diecasting mechanism” creating an “intuitive sense of structuredness that with its transformation of the “open” world of realia into a “closed” world of names, forces people to treat as structures those phenomena whose structuredness, at best, is not apparent” Lotman et al., 1978). 4 The analogy to missile guidance systems is an obvious one – systems theory’s start as cybernetics and a tool for calculating trajectories by balancing positive and negative inputs to stay on course frames

136  Joshua Singer

the concept. The fact that the outcome was destruction might also be an interesting analogy to the consequences of the power of media and message. 5 The Bardzells think that “a design research project may be judged ‘critical’ to the extents that it proposes a perspective-changing holistic account of a given phenomenon, and that this account is grounded in speculative theory, reflects a dialogical methodology, improves the public’s cultural competence, and is reflexively aware of itself as an actor – with both power and constraints – within the social world it is seeking to change.”  This seems like a pretty reasonable description. (Bardzell Bardzell, n.d.) 6 “Hackers create the possibility of new things entering the world. Not always great things, or even good things, but new things. In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old.” (Wark, 2009) 7 The title of the project takes its name from the scientific term ‘Ad Hoc Hypothesis.’ As such, it is a collection of hypotheses added to a verifiable geographic space in order to save it (verifiable geography) from being falsified and to thus compensate for verifiable geographic space’s anomalies not apparent it its usual forms. 8 A collection of maps in a volume. [This use of the word is said to be derived from a representation of Atlas supporting the heavens placed as a frontispiece to early works of this kind, and to have been first used by Mercator in the 16th cent]. A similar volume containing illustrative plates, large engravings, etc., or the conspectus of any subject arranged in tabular form; e.g. ‘an atlas of anatomical plates,’ ‘an ethnographical atlas.’ “Atlas, N.1.” OED Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed February 13, 2014. www.oed.com/view/Entry/12536. 9 It is not alone or the first or the last. The arts in general do this; Brecht’s Alienation Effect; the Situationist’s work as permanent play; the Pataphysicists’ alternative worlds; Fluxus. The Ad Hoc Atlas stands on their shoulders.

References All Images: Ad Hoc Atlas:Volume Two,Version One: Montreal & Berlin. (Detail), 2013 © Joshua Singer. Ambasz, E. (1972). “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape: Counter Design as Postulation.” (No. Release No. 46). Museum of Modern Art. Bardzell, Jeffrey, and Shaowen Bardzell (n.d). What Is Critical About Critical Design. Bruinsma, M. (n.d.). “Culture Catalysts.” Retrieved June 5, 2012, from www.culturecatalysts.org/ site/?q=node/280 Calvelli, J. (2011). “Design Philosophy Politics (New) Design Is/Is Not the Problem.” Design Philosophy Politics. Retrieved from http://designphilosophypolitics.informatics.indiana.edu/?p=143 Dilnot, C. (2015). “The Artificial and What It Opens Towards.” In Design and the Question of History (pp. 165–203). Bloomsbury Publishing. Flusser,Vilém, and John Cullars (1995). “On the Word Design: An Etymological Essay.” Design Issues 11, no. 3 (October 1): 50–53. Friedlander, Eli (2008). “The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image.” Boundary 2 35, no. 3 (Fall): 1–26. Lotman, Y. M. (2000). Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (A. Shukman, Trans.). Indiana University Press. Lotman, Y. M., B. A. Uspensky, and George Mihaychuk (1978). “On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture.” New Literary History 9, no. 2 (January 1): 211–232. Marcuse, H. (1979). The Aesthetic Dimension:Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Ariadne Book. Beacon Press, 1979. Orwell, George (1946). “Politics and the English Language – Essay.” Horizon. Perlroth, N. (2013, December 29). “Solving Problems for Real World, Using Design.” The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2013/12/30/technology/solving-problems-for-realworld-using-design.html Wark, M.K. (2009). A Hacker Manifesto. Harvard University Press.

11 (UN)DESIGN, COMMERCE AND ARTISTIC AUTONOMY Site-specific art in China Xin Gu and Justin O’Connor

Introduction In this chapter, we reflect on the complex relationship between art and design in the contemporary Chinese context. More specifically, we look at how this plays out within sitespecific art. Informed by two case studies of site-specific projects, we look how some of the traditional oppositions established in vocational arts education – between easel painting and graphic design, sculpture and architecture, new media art and advertising – are being eroded by contemporary art practice in China. This concerns not just the forms and qualities of the products (‘art’ versus ‘craft’ or ‘applied’) but the relationship between high and low, vocation as calling and instrumentalism, art and commerce, and their wider social and cultural validation. Art and design each had different relationships to social function in the West. The function of the former involved a transcendence of the present predicated on creative autonomy; the function of the latter concerned a material transformation of everyday life, often with a positive embrace of the necessary heteronomy of practice this would involve. However, over the last decades this difference of function was increasingly reframed as a different relationship to ‘the market’, with complex consequences. Design became associated with consumer allure, its heteronomy shifting from servicing the needs of everyday life to needs of the client to sell product. The ‘aestheticization of everyday life’ (Featherstone, 1991) which underlay the expansion of the ‘cultural’ or ‘creative’ industries from the later 1960s onwards combined the transcendental potential of art with the transformative promise of designed consumerism. Extricating design’s transformative potential for everyday life from the subservience to consumer markets has led to the a number of attempted ‘disruptive’ tactics, of which undesign is one, and which recall prior avant-garde moves against the commodification of art. In parallel, art’s accelerated commodification, driven by an expanding global art market, has come about less through its reduction to a mass reproduction commodity (Adorno’s and Bourdieu’s fears) but through the artwork coming to exemplify the contemporary commodity itself (Boltanski and Esquerre, 2016; Lutticken, 2016). The experiential, the post-material, the relational – these are the desired qualities of a high-value added contemporary commodity. The market value of an artwork is in inverse relation to its heteronomous functionality; its autonomy is precisely the site of its commodification.

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If we have framed the above in standard Western terms of artistic autonomy vis-a-vis both the market and the social, Chinese artists are dealing here with a context in which this discourse of creative autonomy is relatively recent, of foreign origin (good and bad) and frequently seen as the privilege of those consecrated by the art market. In different ways, both the traditional (‘Confucian’) and Communist constructions of the artist/ intellectual involved a clear socio-ethical function not an autonomous transcendental creativity.The position available for the artist in contemporary China is highly ambiguous, with the autonomous artists positioned as socially marginal (unless rich and successful) and the state consecrated artist both moribund and controlled. In the last thirty years however, the market has been seen not as a threat to artistic autonomy but as a primary source of autonomy vis-à-vis the state. How to reframe art’s transcendent, visionary function as a social one rooted in everyday life as well as global art markets has underpinned many Chinese contemporary artists’ interventions in the last decades. In this, we see aspirations for a socially rooted, yet transcendent art and a deliberately dysfunctional ‘undesign’ seeking ways to transform everyday life outside consumer allure, come closer together. However, the contemporary landscape is also one in which the different aspirations of art and design to change life have become hopelessly intertwined, and it has not always been easy for the various strategies of (un)design and art radicalism to resist becoming unwittingly complicit with new forms of experiential, aesthetic consumerism. Nowhere is this more so than in ‘site-specific’ art-design projects, in which the various memes of relational aesthetics (Bourriaud 2002), the affective transformation of socio-spatial practices and the anti-elitist escape from the ‘white cube’ toward participation are frequently combined with high-end commercial real estate. In observing two site-specific art-design projects, we hope to render some of the complexity involved in negotiating art, commerce and social function.

Two projects On June 25, 2016, a workshop titled ‘Revitalization: a spatial re-imagination of museums’ took place in Chi K11, a new addition to a collective of ultra modern art galleries in Shanghai. Keynote speakers included the chief curator of Chi K11 and developer of SiFang Art Museum (SFAM) – another contemporary art gallery in Nanjing, inland from Shanghai – and artists Zhang Ding and Yu Ji, who had created site-specific artworks in SFAM. Both artists were known for their site-specific art practices: Zhang’s Enter the Dragon II exhibited at Chi K11, was a reiteration of his signature piece first performed at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London in 2015.1 Yu Ji is part of a small group of Shanghai based avant-garde artists who have become known collectively for their site-specific experiments new to the Chinese contemporary art world. The key questions this workshop aimed at answering concerned what an ‘alternative’ gallery space might look like in China, how these might be effectively wired into the Chinese urban development process, and the effects both of these might have on the future of Chinese art world. Huang Shenzhi, Chief curator of Chi K11, argued that site-specific art is the answer to all of the above questions. To him, site-specific art is the ‘art for the masses’ (艺术为大众), a key branding slogan utilized by Chi K11 since its inception in the local art world.2 Huang used the example of Enter the dragon II by artist Zhang Ding as an example to show how the adoption of multimedia in site-specific experiments has the potential to change audience perception of

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Chi K11 as a contemporary ‘gallery space’ – the live performance lured the audience to engage with art in an easy social setting of ‘shopping’, breaking down the myth of the art gallery set apart from the everyday. Chi K11’s approach to question the role of art gallery (and the role of art in public life) responds to the ‘crisis’ of public galleries by embracing populism. As public art institutions give in to demand for more popular content, private/alternative art spaces mushroomed, blurring the line further between ‘contemporary art’ and ‘advertising’. On observing Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s 2016 collaboration with Bon Marche in Paris, artist historian Fumaroli commented that contemporary art is increasingly about servicing the rich and wealthy, but ‘because they have no taste, whoever shocks the most is valued’.3 A different kind of art/market relation can be observed through the practices of the young Chinese contemporary artists we interviewed in Shanghai.4 Born in the 90s and growing up witnessing the evolution of the art industry from a controlled sphere to an explosion of ideas and boundaries, their views directly concern this blurring of distinctions between art and commerce, as well as high and low art in the Chinese contemporary art world. Whilst the status of shopping mall turned art galleries like Chi K11 is still being debated, SFAM’s Mountain Gallery Project (山中美术馆) also force us to think about different configurations of art and commerce. The ‘Mountain Gallery’ project sought to commission twenty art projects by twenty artists, based on twenty concept villas and their natural surroundings of the Lao Mountain Forestry Park in Nanjing. If Chi K11 has been described as the opposite of an art gallery – art value as secondary to commerce, subordinate, a tool for consumerism and de-politicized – then here is a commercial real estate project sponsoring a high art experiment, one where art making seems relatively ‘purer’. The artists involved in such projects value the opportunity to intervene in everyday, mundane practices and see the strong connection to the market in these initiatives as both an opportunity to sustain their art practice outside of the highly ‘controlled’ establishments of the Chinese art world, but the question is whether the pursuit for a new meaningful identification of their practice with everyday life signals real social transformation or is just an illusion of autonomous art.

Chi K11: art in a shopping mall Chi K11 is a pioneer in shaping the interaction between art and business in China, appropriately located in the basement of one of Shanghai’s most luxurious shopping malls, K11: Shanghai Chi K11 art space is just like a playground of art where we motivate customers’ art potential throughout state-like experiences and take art works out of museums and place them within your touch. It is a place where contemporary art develops, ordinary public gets close with art and indigenous culture is expressed.5 K11’s 2016 blockbuster show – ‘包.当代/Bagism – We are all in the same bag!’ is the kind of exhibition that Chi K11 is famously known for, putting art at the service of consumerism. Labeled as reflecting an ‘artisanal movement’, and implicitly referencing John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s intervention of 1969, now denuded of politics, the exhibition showcased 300 luxury brand bags, which incorporated 15 contemporary artists’ designs. The experience of attending the opening cannot be any further removed from the traditional experience of

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an art exhibition. Fashion accessories, magazines and interactive media were the focus of the show. Bagism clearly is not art; neither does it pretend to be. Using Hal Foster’s words (2003), it is about creating a spectacle, a way to accumulate ‘cultural capital’ for the gallery and its director/curator. Chi K11 is run by the K11 Art Foundation (KAF), a Hong Kong based non-for-profit organization under directorship of young cultural entrepreneur Adrian Cheng. Built through his extended networks in the international art world, Cheng sits on the Committee of many international museums including the Tate Modern and Centre Pompidou. Cheng is not only a patron of Chinese contemporary art but also an intermediary in an emergent art world composed of young urban based artists engaging in various forms of ‘relational art’ experiments. The ability of Cheng to help facilitate the rise of this particular art form in China is at many levels comparable to Saatchi’s immense influence on ‘Young British Art’ in the 1990s. Chi K11’s core group of artists is typically under the age of 35, born and/or working in Shanghai. The collaboration with Chi K11 gave these artists the opportunity to work under MET and Palais de Tokyo (PT),6 both of which are known for pioneering relational art. In April 2016, Cynthia Jiang curated an exhibition for Chi K11, ‘WE: a community of Chinese contemporary artists’ including artists Chen Tianzhuo, Cheng Ran, Gao Mingyan, Liao Fei, Liu Ren, Tang Dixin, Su Chang, Wu Ding,Yu Ji, Zhang Ding and Zhang Ruyi, all of which are Shanghai based and are considered ‘relational’ in their art practice.7 From its inception, Chi K11 has adopted a populist view of the public with strong affinities to relational artistic practices. This is a clever PR strategy, one that claims a direct democratic appeal without touching on a more sensitive politics. Chi K11 has often been associated with a new democratic art socialization agenda.8 The questioning of the role of the artist in this new approach marks many artworks commissioned. In an interview, Zhang Ding substantiated his works around this precise question, Is the artist important? I see myself more as a ‘producer’. The idea of producing a ‘project’ (not an art ‘exhibition’) is attractive to me because it allowed for a wider participation bringing with it more energy. To achieve this goal, I have to simplify the art forms. I wanted to break the myth of the artist and pay respect to all the participants in the process of art making especially the musicians in this project.9 Zhang Ding’s project Enter the Dragon II, based on the popular film by Chinese Kungfu star Bruce Lee, typified this relational art strategy by drawing the audience’s attention to the possibility of participation. His work used an eclectic range of music from acoustic, ambient, electronic to experimental, punk and techno.The first incarnation of the project took place at ICA in London in 2015 when the artist transformed the ICA theatre into a sound sculpture by ‘covering the room with reflective surfaces, suspended sound panels and a series of rotating mirrored sculptures situated in front of two identical stages where musicians will be invited to perform in unison’.10The performance relied on the uncertainties of audiences’ interaction: despite the setting’s bellicose inspiration, the plan, apparently, is to encourage ad hoc collaboration between randomly programmed performers in the space. In the spirit of fruitful collaboration, perhaps it would be wise for the more typically fractious elements of London’s music scene to bear in mind the great Lee’s immortal words: ‘The word “I” does not exist’.11

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Demystifying the role of the artist is necessary for challenging the legitimacy of the established art world (Nakajima 2012), according to Zhang, who argues that the Chinese art world is controlled by a few public museums and galleries, their endorsed artists and curators, and centered around a dominant art form (traditional easel painting).Thus new media art and other avant-garde forms do not have legitimacy in Chinese mainstream art market. To break out of this structured domination, Zhang believes that artists have the responsibility of re-shaping the distinction between high and low, legitimate/ illegitimate art, as the art world should not be about a controlled space or process. This was the basis for Enter of Dragon II in which the artist created a fragile space where ‘control’ and ‘uncontrol’ were juxtaposed. In an interview, Zhang stressed that although the show has used traditional art exhibition staging tools incorporating multiple ‘mirrors’, these are not to be confused with the performance of art itself.12 The aim for this ‘designed’ stage and concert was to invite re-interpretation, to undesign (Jones 2006). The space, though familiar to a popular music audience, is at the same time able to disrupt the ‘known’. By doing so, the artist tried to divert the audience’s attention away from the staged object – the mirror and the performance platform – to that of a multitude of different fluid connections individuals built with their surroundings. This was to be achieved not through the careful curatorship of the artist; the facilitating of the exchange of feelings at a ‘composed’ moment became the artwork itself. Similarly, artist Chen Tianshuo’s Trayastrima employed performance and theatre in order to make possible the transition of the gallery space from a closed environment to an open one.Taking inspiration from rave culture, Chen tried to disrupt the division of high and low by framing performance art as the new Chinese club culture.Terms often used in popular music, like ‘crew’, ‘labels’ and ‘parties’, are favored by Chen when asked to describe his Freak Opera of Asian Dope Boys.13 Along with its amateur cast, Chen emphasized the entertainment value of his work, [it] brings together sculptural, video and performative elements and features recurring characters that are grotesque, yet familiar: a menagerie of outlandish acrobats, androgynous characters, five-eyed blondes and gangster rappers. In another piece, a skinned and splayed Eric Cartman, the iconic character from South Park, is reincarnated into a luxurious carpet design. ADAHA II was performed across three separate platforms, traversing a water fountain, a neon flame and two, four-meter tall polyfoam sculptures that resembled deities whose ‘ruined’ aftermath are presented in Shanghai.14 Re-conceptualizing the ‘art gallery’ is an explicit objective by which Chi K11 sought to curate an alternative space in the Chinese contemporary art world. It is now considered as one of the most important contemporary art exhibition spaces in Shanghai, alongside contemporary private galleries Long Museum and Yuz Museum. But there is a fine line between creating an environment in which public participation is possible and a space of pure entertainment. The end game for Chi K11 might not be to sell art directly to the public but the values celebrated by Chi K11 including the ‘artist-as-designer’, ‘function over contemplation’ and ‘open-endedness over aesthetic resolution’, have little to say in response to the social concerns raised by critics of western relational art – ‘what types of relations are being produced, for whom and why’ (Bishop, 2004). Chi K11 has offered greater participatory potential for its audience but it is, nevertheless, colored by the socio- economic status of its upper middle class visitors, and their particular ‘anxieties’ in a world of hyper-consumerism. Chi K11’s inaugural show was ‘Truth, Beauty, Freedom and Money: Art after Social Media Era’.

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SiFang Art Museum: art as real estate Unlike Chi K11’s attempt to challenge the legitimacy of museums and galleries in China, SF Art Museum has given up its ‘official’ status to join the real estate game. SF’s project is to provide ongoing art residencies from within a real estate project situated in Lao Mountain Scenery Park.The site is composed of over twenty architecturally designed high-concept buildings over a 3000sqm site at the edge of Nanjing. SF Art Museum occupies one of the buildings designed by renowned American architect Steven Hull. Before moving to its current location in 2013, SF Art Museum was a well-known non-profit private museum dedicated to the collection of traditional Chinese art, located in Nanjing CBD. Its chief curator was artist and critic Li Xiaoshan, who specializes in Chinese modern oil paining. Li is also affiliated with Nanjing University Arts Academy – a key gatekeeper in the state sponsored Chinese art world. With the new site’s ultra modern take on architectural aesthetics, SF Art Museum became increasingly obsessed with Chinese contemporary art, in particular relational art. SFAM’s current director Lu Xun advocates for a ‘weak curatorship’ in the institution – releasing artists from the constraints of studios and galleries. This has given more opportunities to young and emerging artists who would not otherwise have chosen to work with state sponsored galleries, according to Lu.15 The only brief these artists are given by the SF art project was to incorporate the natural surrounding – rivers, mountains and forestry- in their creation. This extends the gallery space to the entire scenery of the park and each of these artists’ creations becomes an individualized reflection on this differentiated and expansive terrain.

FIGURE 11.1  SiFang Art

Author’s own photo.

Museum.

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At the heart of this unique art experiment is ‘unexpectedness’ deriving from the audience’s own re-interpretation elicited by the artwork. It invites the audience to explore further the meanings of their built environment, going beyond the bounded intent of the architecture in its ‘setting’ toward new, surprising connections and resonances. For her creation of Etude – Tempo III, artist Yu Ji worked on a treetop next to a modern concrete building. She repeatedly brushed melted rosin onto tree branches to form sculpture-like shapes. The making of art, according to Yuji,16 is a process of ‘fermentation’ allowing nature to set its own course just like our relationship with buildings and nature. The continuous engagement with such ‘uncontrollable’ processes is like developing a dialogue with nature in a seemingly never ending and repetitive act of brushing and coagulation. Yuji’s work can also be seen as a protest against the ‘controlled’ and hierarchical art world in China. In a series of interviews with art historian Dal Lago (2000), Zhang Dali, one of the key figures in this field, explained that his choice to go ‘site-specific’ was less deliberate but more to do with the lack of exhibition spaces in the city. Works like Yuji’s Etude – Tempo III would not have been exhibited in any officially recognized museum or gallery. As a prolific figure within site-specific art practice, Wang Jianwei raised the existential question of such works. Can they exist beyond the end of the production cycle? Wang’s work extends the current debate from the spatial constraints of a gallery to that of the cultural language of ‘image’. He observed that the power relationships artists developed with galleries derived largely from their recognizable and salable images. Site-specific work, argued by Wang, should work to challenge the legitimacy of ‘image’ as the only ‘visual product’ acceptable within the ‘white box’. SF art project is one such challenge, asking what kind of product counts as ‘art’ and what kind of relationship do they set up with the audience.

FIGURE 11.2 Live

performance of the art work Etude – Tempo III, by artist Yuji.

Photo: courtesy of Yuji.

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As a product, the exhibition is not the ‘end’ of the creative processes for many artists involved. The artworks and the process of making will live on and continue to evolve with nature after the exhibition through the art residency programs. Concerning the audience, the art projects emphasize the audience’s individual experience (past and present) by exploring multiple relations that art can have with everyday life (Meyer 2000). Wei Wang’s Natural History of Lao Mountain was a plastered mosaic from Guangdong, shifting context of the entire site. Similarly, Zheng Bo re-planted native plants on the museum’s roof and asked the audience to construct new links between art and nature. Tang Dixing’s work ‘Sky is no bigger than my straw hat’ humorously blurred past and present by asking the audience to engage with experience of shifting time and space. Xie Fan’s performance art invited the direct participation of the audience in thinking about the relationship between everyday life and religion. Most of these artworks tried to purposefully shift the attention away from the artworks toward individualized experiences, from the ‘material’ world (buildings and nature) to the ‘immaterial’ feeling and memory of the spectator. SF Project demonstrates the potential of site-specific art in China. However, questions constantly surface amongst the arts community about the SF project: ‘Are these art works tradable?’ ‘How can we value their exchange value when they are not transferable?’ Preservation of the work is a key issue but the more important question is, who owns them – the property developers or artists themselves? The SF project clearly disrupted the art market organized around identifiable ‘product’ but the issue of the commodity after-life of these projects raised further questions. Artists involved in these experiments questioned the ethics of their creative activity. SF Project is about real estate development – to create a recognizable cultural brand for a property. Of course, the question of whether artists are being exploited and absorbed by the market is not a new one.Tang Di Xing, exhibiting artist in the SF project, has taken a pragmatic view by arguing that no one can escape the tyranny of the market. One has to adapt to it and make it work for art. This is not necessarily a fatalism. Many share his attempt to take distance from the market by articulating the structural immunity and purity of the art field. ‘Artists should always have separate value propositions to those market values but it should not prevent artists from utilizing available resources to achieve those artistic goals’. 17 But is such a view, that art is separate and above the market, simply a naive (or faux-naïve) return to art pour l’art? Artists involved in site-specific works have often been characterized as ‘uninterested’ in the market. Wang Jianwei challenges this by asking what value the market really confers. Can ‘making art for the mass’ be equated to ‘making art for the market’? Wang’s works use an artistic language that is derived from everyday life but which does not conform to art market expectation. Thus, for him, the surge of super collectors of Chinese contemporary art bring a preference for traditional art forms (such as easel painting) and act as a shaping force on art current market standards. Zhang Dali echoed this by suggesting that the expectations on the form of art that one produces impacts on whether the work will eventually be exhibited. However, opposing these market standards does not necessarily lead to an opposition to the art market as such. Artists are not prepared to work for free; both Chi K11 and SF project are backed by wealthy art patrons. The artworks are part of a rather effective cultural branding exercise for high-end developments. It is difficult to measure the extent of the commercial interference in the creative processes. What is clear is that artists can and do achieve an autonomy, whilst lending the cultural capital for the marketing and branding of shopping mall and property

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development. If we follow Russel Keat’s (2000) conceptualization of art as ‘meta-goods’, the values of which are always partially embedded in other goods, we may be able to understand artists’ ability to work comfortably with developers in the SF project without being reduced to ‘cogs in the machine’. In the following section, we will attempt to place the Chinese ‘white box’ – and the responses exemplified by our two case studies – in a broader context in order to identify aspects distinct to China.

The ‘White Box’ debate in China Brian O’Doherty (1976) coined the term ‘the white box’, arguing that this enclosed space deeply influences the ideology of art making in contemporary society. The white box is not neutral but a product of power structures in the art world. As Robertson (2016) suggested, contemporary museums practices are organized around the commercial logic of the art market by focusing on ‘objective’ knowledge. ‘The material is isolated from its context and arranged as commodity, often following a linear timeline of development and evolution’ (pp. 251). Kwon (1997) suggested that through site-specific works artists challenged such structures by diverting audience attention to ‘an inextricable, indivisible relationship between the work and its site, and demanded the physical presence of the viewer for the work’s completion’. To Kwon, such an approach accentuated the multiple opportunities opened up in post-modernist art, which were limited by the white box scenario. Site-specific artworks offered the possibility of working with non-traditional media and non-traditional institutions, eliciting new ways of meaning making by diverting attention from the art object to its context, a focus on ‘bodily experience’ and the aspiration to change the course of capitalistic circulation of art as commodity. Our observation of site-specific art in Chinese contemporary practices supports the above to some extent. However, it also occurs to us that the western debate cannot capture fully the complex social, political and economic questions affiliated with the positioning of artistic selfhood in the Chinese contemporary ‘art field’. The kind of symbolic capital accumulated in a zone of autonomous, ‘restricted’ artistic production as suggested by Bourdieu (1996) – where artists gain the recognition of their peers and benefit symbolically from their position on the margins of the mainstream market for cultural goods – cannot be relied upon to bring wider social, let alone economic, capital. Two fields of art are in play. Traditional, state consecrated art gains high recognition domestically, acting as a route to public exhibition, in public institutions such as Shanghai art Museum as well as private museums such as Long Museum. There is also the highly successful Chinese contemporary art world, which is linked to the international art market and its related circuits of validation, whose value rose despite the lack of recognition within the state consecrated Chinese art world. Negotiating these two fields of art within a wider context, in which the social status of the artist is very low compared to the West, is fraught with ambiguities. Chi K11, for example, is clearly about the circulation of art as commodity, but this also played out as a resistance to state consecrated art opening up new non-state sites of meaning making and public engagement. In this sense, the Chinese white box debate cannot just be about the spatial reconfiguration – taking art out of the museums. Lifting artworks out of existing spaces of domination (the gallery or the arts academy) does not assure the demise of the power structure. To evade the power of state consecration means opening up a new kind of negotiation with the power of the art market, which is linked to an international art world that itself is being courted

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by an astute commercially and ‘soft-power’ driven Chinese state. How artists negotiate these different power structures is important in understanding artistic autonomy in China. Sitespecific art is not endorsed by the state, nor is it immediately sellable in commoditized art markets. However, the zone of autonomy they seek is highly volatile and provisional. In China, artists have engaged in site-specific art and used the market as a way to evade the power of the official art world and engage a public beyond the traditional art world audience. Site-specific artists considered it their mission to extend art making to the streets and engage with a wider urban environment. Nevertheless, there are trade offs. Any ‘political’ message can only be of a general or anodyne nature. Zhang Dali’s work reflecting on urban demolition sites remained at the epistemological and experiential level. His works may well have led to more political questions, but he was hesitant to pursue them. And many of those involved in the SF project are more interested in philosophical meanings than the political – reflecting perhaps a wider sense that contemporary Chinese art (post-1978) represented a liberation from politics (cf. Liang, 2014). The wider social impact of these works is uncertain. The ideological vision outlined by early site-specific art experiments such as the Culture in Action community arts movement in Chicago (1992–1993), was strikingly absent in the Chinese case. The influence of a project like SF on wider social issues is further obscured by the fact that the art making process is to ‘artificially’ create the cultural identity suitable for the country’s wealthy and privileged class. The irony in the project is precisely the location, with a city experiencing severe housing shortage problem (Nanjing is one of China’s populated cities), the development of luxury high-concept architectural villas in a remote resort cannot solve either the social problem, nor can it deliver the ‘leftist’ inclusionary strategy of Culture in Action in Chicago. Despite this, we believe that the resistance was embedded in a much more grassroots way: site-specific art as a way of life emerging outside of the fixed processes and sites of official art making. Writing about graffiti and street art in Chinese cities,Valjakka (2015) suggested that a reciprocal relationship exists between urban art making and spatial design. What she calls ‘site-responsive urban art’ is uniquely Chinese in the sense that it does more than challenge the authoritative narrative of the art world. Artists ‘gradually reshape the space into meaningful places they can identify with’ (p. 274). Valjakka’s observation chimed with the nature of the more grassroots community art practices in Chinese cities, which have, as the two cases above have shown, become increasingly separated from both the state sponsored art world and a narrowly prescribed international art market. However, the line between art and commerce is always thin and mobile. The deliberate move away from the gallery toward a ‘live experience’ can quickly turn into something more directly commercial, as the Chi K11 case showed. It is certainly true that such experiences can breathe new life into a Chinese art world that has become increasingly subsumed into a conservative logic dominated by state sponsored art academies, museums and galleries. At the same time, such practices help cultivate the rampant consumerism by turning art into a tool for facilitating fleeting individualized experiences which constantly threaten to obliterate its artistic qualities. Equally, such site-specific work always risks a collapse back into the elitism it seeks to escape. As Brenson wrote of an earlier site-specific work, Sculpture Projects Münster in 1987, the project ‘insists on its sensitivity to the needs of the people, but its desire to educate and challenge usually assumes a feeling of superiority. The result can be a pretentious unpretentiousness’ (1987). The suspicion surrounding SF project in Nanjing concerns precisely how the

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elitism and exclusivity of the site obscures the place of site-specific art as a new alternative space for Chinese contemporary art.

Site-specific art as hyper design In 2006, the sixth Shanghai Biennial used ‘hyper design’ as its main theme. Ru (2009) observed that ‘hyper’ was referring to design’s role in surpassing functionality. However, the implementation of ‘hyper design’ in the art context was curiously interpreted as the art’s response to its own crisis. Žižek’s theorization of design ideology provides legitimacy for design to be conceived as art: the dimensions of non-functional ‘aesthetic’ display always supplements the basic functional utility of an instrument; it is, rather, the other way around: the non-functional ‘aesthetic’ display of the produced object is primordial, and its eventual utility comes second, i.e. it has the status of a by-product, of something that parasitizes on the basic function. (Žižek 2014, p. 70) If this is the case, what could be art’s response to it? Does it mean the melting down of the disciplinary boundaries? As the Shanghai Biennial clearly demonstrated through its selection of contemporary artworks, hyper design is a reminder for artists to ‘undesign’, to de-strategize and to avoid being used as an instrument serving the functional utility required by the commodity market. However, this cannot be equated to an objection to the market per se – not in China at least. As identified by those artists involved in the site-specific experiments we have discussed, there are the right and wrong kind of markets. The ‘right’ market is one for a broad public, in which participation is free and does not pre-ascribe meanings to audiences. The ‘wrong’ kind of market is for the privileged, being exclusive and requiring pre-acquired knowledge in cultural consumption. One of the artists describes such distinction in these terms: so at least they (the public) will know what I am doing . . . the public that goes to the China Art Gallery consists of either people from the academies of fine arts or people who are otherwise connected to the art world. Other people in China very seldom go to the China Art Gallery to see art. Ask your neighbors. They probably haven’t entered a museum for years, if ever. And earlier there wasn’t even a China Art Gallery. Now that there is one, it served as a site of government propaganda. It is certainly not a space for artists to exhibit their works. The different strategies employed by the two site-specific projects are reflections of playing the ‘right’ market against the ‘wrong’ market. Working with commercial spaces like the Chi K11, with popular cultural industries (such as Zhang Ding’s work with pop musicians), even with new languages such as performance and engaging with the audiences as part of the making of art – all these invoke the opposite values to those at play in the ‘wrong’ markets. It could ultimately lead to the rejection of anything good in the ‘wrong’ market. As one artist reflected upon Chi K11’s exhibition WE-a story about Chinese contemporary art, is nothing but a ‘violent bundling of a group of artists, despite their varied aesthetic styles and cultural

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languages’ – unified by their common exclusion from and opposition to the consecrated Chinese art world(s). As Yu expressed, for artists in China the main challenge is that ‘everything happens so fast, before you can critically analyze it and work out whether to reject it or be part of it, a new era is already shedding its veil’. It is yet to be seen whether the strategy of drawing attention away from the reified end product and directing it toward the process of making is a significant shift in the evolution in Chinese art. For the time being, site-specific art has opened up a space for artists to think collectively about their relationship with the market, their function, and their public. In this way the kinds of ‘undesign’ being practiced in site-specific contexts, runs a line between disruption of everyday expectations – to set out the unexpected, that which is not immediately available for assimilation as consumer object nor the distancing of the work of art as aesthetic object.

Notes 1 Enter the Dragon is a series of collaborative live performance art projects designed by Zhang Ding. It drew inspiration from the popular Kung Fu film of the same title starring film star Bruce Lee. Enter the dragon I was first exhibited via the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London and was taken to the stage of Chi K11 in Shanghai in the subsequent year. Enter the Dragon II is a four-part series of performances featuring local and global musicians in the experimental and electronic music scene. The Shanghai part of this project can be viewed here https://vimeo.com/171558132 2 Huang’s view was first expressed in an interviewed with Art News. For the full article on ‘TANC Art Talk | site specific, reactivating galleries’, follow the link http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=Mj M5MjMwODQwMQ==&mid=2650542708&idx=1&sn=85c1333df1e87c6af79dd6df4c1f5b35& scene=5&srcid=07028HBQNDQajXnO1euWoELD#rd 3 In the article ‘Ai Weiwei’s latest Canvas: a luxury Emporium in Paris’, by Rachel Donadio (The New York Times, January 19, 2016), art historian Marc Fumaroli was interviewed about Ai’s collaboration with Bon Marche, in a shopping mall in Paris in 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/ arts/design/ai-weiweis-latest-canvas-a-luxury-emporium-in-paris.html 4 The evidences gathered in this paper were abstracted from a recent Australian Research Council Project ‘working the cultural field’. Interviews with Chinese contemporary artists took place in two stages: Oct 2015 – December 2015; May – July 2016. 5 About Shanghai Chi K11 art space, www.k11.com/corp/art/, checked Oct 15, 2016. 6 Interview with Chi K11 collaborating artists. 7 The artists use the term ‘relational’ rather loosely, combining it with more general elements of ‘participatory’ art. 8 http://www.k11.com/corp/art/, ‘Shanghai Chi K11 Art Space’. http://k11.thewowa.com 9 Full interview was published on Art Forum http://artforum.com.cn/words/8624#, Interviewed by Dou Zi, October 30, 2015. 10 For a detailed description and a short video of the performance: https://vimeo.com/150764035; ICA has a complete list of the two weeks’ program: www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/ica-and-k11art-foundation-present-zhang-ding-enter-dragon 11 Ibid 12 Ibid 13 An interview with Chen titled The Freak Opera of Asian Dope Boys by Josh Feola For Smart Shanghai on May 19, 2016. www.smartshanghai.com/articles/arts/event-preview-asian-dope-boys 14 For a detailed description of the show, go to www.k11artfoundation.org/en/programme/tianzhuochen/ and the trail of the performance ADAHA II can be found on vimeo https://vimeo. com/132515433 15 Lu Xun’s interview by hiart.cn, titled ‘young artists are the most interesting group’, 20 November 2013. www.hiart.cn/feature/detail/bdcdoyt.html 16 Interview with Yuji – June 30, 2016. Nanjing. 17 Interview with Tangdixin – January 14, 2016. Shanghai.

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References Bishop, Claire (2004) ‘Antagnism and relational aesthetics’. pp. 54–55. Need complete reference. Boltanski, Luc and Esquerre, Arnaud (2016) ‘The economic life of things’. New Left Review 98, pp. 31–56. Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1996) The rules of art – Genesis and structure of the literary field. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourriaud, Nicholas (2002) ‘Relational form’. In Relational Aesthetics. Les Presse Du Reel, Franc; Les Presses Du Reel edition, pp. 11–24. Brenson, Michael (1987) ‘Art: The munster sculpture project’. New York Times. June 22. Dal Lago, Francesca et al. (2000) ‘Space and public: Site specificity in Beijing’. Art Journal 59 (1), pp. 74–87. Featherstone, Mike (1991) Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage. Foster, Hal (2003) ‘Arty Party’. London Review of Books 25 (23), pp. 21–22. Jones, Kip (2006) ‘A biographic researcher in pursuit of an aesthetic: the use of arts – based (re)presentations in ‘performative’ dissemination of life stories’. Qualitative Sociology Review 2 (1). Keat, Russell (2000) Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market. London & New York: Routledge. Kwon, Miwon (1997) ‘One place after another: Non site specificity’. October 80 (Spring), pp. 85–110. Liang Luo (2014) The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Lutticken, Sven (2016) ‘Art and the crisis of value’. New Left Review 99, pp. 111–138. Meyer, James (2000) ‘The Functional site; or the transformation of site-specificity’, in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderberg. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 23–37. Nakajima, Seio (2012) ‘Prosumption in art’, American Behavioral Scientist 56 (4), pp. 550–569. O’Doherty, Brian (1976) ‘Inside the white cube: Notes on the gallery space’. Artforum 14 (7), pp. 24–30. Robertson, Iain (2016) Understanding art markets. London & New York: Routledge. Ru, Mingjun (2009) ‘Design, ‘hyper design’ and contemporary art’. [设计,‘超设计’ 与当代艺术] Nanjing art academy press (2), pp. 67–70. Valjakka, Minna (2015) ‘Negotiating spatial politics: Site-responsive urban art images in mainland China’. China Information 29 (2): 253–281. Žižek Slavoj (2014) ‘Design as an ideological state-apparatus’, in Designing Everyday Life, eds. Boelen, Jan and Sacchetti,Vera. Museum of Architecture and Design and Park Books, pp. 55–70.

12 BRIDGING COUNTER-CULTURE GRASSROOTS INITIATIVES WITH DESIGN Spyros Bofylatos

Introduction This chapter aims to bridge different emerging bottom up organisations with design practice. We are living in an age of unprecedented austerity and recession, which has bolstered the emergence of a variety of grassroots counter-culture movements that have different goals and methods. These forms of resistance create a colourful mosaic, a disruptive and critical social space. The common thread between these self-organising initiatives is the need to change the current social-economical model into a something new, something that better fits the needs of humanity while respecting the natural environment and personal individuality. Living in a design led world it is important to understand and bridge these movements and emerging design practices. By deconstructing these counter-culture initiatives and getting to their core, we are able to bridge this with design practices and engage in a meaningful dialogue. This process is by no means finite but the aim is to engage the design community in a dialogue and critique of both design and activism, in the context of transcending the existing society into a more open collaborative and democratic one. This transition is one from modernity towards the next era of human societies, “Sustainment may be equated in scale with the epochal shift of the 18th century” (Fry, 2004). By understanding these initiatives and communities and relating them to emerging design practices, I aim to identify the meaningful directions for research and practice, direction that foster the transition towards sustainment, enable the emergence of an alternative system of values that is compatible with sustainable lifestyles and cross-pollinate different fields of design towards a more holistic approach that fosters the shifts necessary for the transition towards Sustainment.

The need for transition The industrial revolution introduced an instrumental view of the environment, which remains an integral part of our current worldview and tied to capitalism. It is evident in the way environmental costs are externalised in the production process. In the same vein, capitalism has the same instrumentalised perspective on humans and their work. As a response, sustainability has

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moved from addressing environmental issues to include environmental, societal and economic issues (Elkington, 1997; Walker, 2011). The instrumental perspective is based on the assumption that no limits exist on the planet or, that with the appropriate technology limits can be expanded forever (Meadows, 1972). Of course, there were competing views of nature (including a Romantic view that nature always exceeded human capacity), hence there were always voices raising the problem of human limits (such as Malthus, 1798; Jevons, 1865). Even in Enlightenment philosophy, Voltaire’s satirical novel Candide ridiculed this viewpoint. The problem of limits to this instrumental view of nature again gained mainstream attention during the sixties, when, in 1963, the book Silent Spring was published and ignited the environmental movement. Its author, Rachel Carson, drew attention to the use of pesticides such as DDT and the destruction of wildlife they caused. Carson criticised unintended and unpredicted consequences of technology that was meant to better our lives. She warned that these chemicals contain the prospect of a dying world in which springtime will no longer bring forth new life, only science (Carson, 1962). The discovery of strontium-90 from nuclear fallout and DDT, a pesticide, in the fat of Antarctic penguins forced governments to take measures against actions that greatly deteriorate the natural environment, like the atmospheric testing of nuclear devices. The ban of DDTs in the US in 1972 and the “Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer”, which banned the destructive halogenated hydrocarbons, such as CFCs, is evidence of governments recognising the need for control of the environmental impacts of human activity. What truly illustrated the possibility of a global environmental crisis were the photographs of earth taken by the Apollo astronauts from space (Dressner, 2002) Photographs showing a blue-white marble filled with life surrounded by the hostile blackness of the void. These photographs truly visualised the metaphor of spaceship earth and the limits around it, and they helped bolster the environmental movement. The absence of the notion of limits does not affect only our interaction with the environment; it is an integral part of the economy as well. Growth is a structural part of modern capitalism. A quick fix to the problem of limits was the shift from material production to symbolic production. This shift is best illustrated by the 1971 abandonment of the gold standard. This ‘freed’ the financial industry from any ties to the material world and allowed the uncontrollable growth and the ‘financialisation’ of capital (Graebe, 2012). The financial industry makes money by trading money, based on prediction of future profits. The value of these financial products, however, is fictitious and is – almost in its entirety – based on good will, and has caused “the real economy to become an appendage to the speculative bubbles sustained by the finance industry” (Gortz, 2010) The creation and growth of debt is structural in this process and the middle and lower classes are encouraged to live beyond their means by borrowing or investing (Žižek, 2012). This inflation of the symbolic economy with the constant creation of debt is necessary for economic growth to exist. This ‘growthphilia’ (Boulanger, 2010) is not associated only with the financial sector; it has been part of the material economy and the industrial production system since the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution was the first time that society had “managed to overcome the constraints imposed on production by the preindustrial social structure, the deficient science and technology, famine and death” (Hobsbawm, 1962, p. 263). The advances in science, medicine, and production enabled the creation of cheap, more widely affordable mass-produced goods, dramatically increased the overall life expectancy (especially throughout the twentieth century) and eventually made long travel easier and more accessible to the

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masses. In short, the industrial revolution shaped the world that we are living in and even enabled us. Yet, for all the myriad improvements to the life of humans, we have simultaneously come to realise that this paradigm shift in human societies is responsible for many of the problems that we are facing today. The need to sell more in order to grow helped create the notion of planned obsolescence, “the second most dangerous concept ever invented by marketers” (Shedroff, 2009, p. 282). The meaning behind this concept is the artificial shortening of product lifecycle in order to give up or throw away perfectly good things in favour of new ones.The phrase was coined in the late 1920s, but it was popularised by an industrial designer, Brooks Stevens, in the 1950s (Packard, 1960).This decision is directly tied with two important concepts: commodification and innovation. Superficial innovation is creating new immaterial qualities that do not add any functional value to a product, and, as such, it is an important part of the mechanism fostering the system. The increases in production, made possible through the industrial revolution, eventually surpassed the needs of consumers. The need for growth however demands a growth in production and profits, which in turn requires an increase in demand. The design and creation of products with immaterial qualities is necessary to ensure future growth. This is based on the different forms of planned obsolescence, namely technological, aesthetic, functional obsolescence (Walker, 2006a). The material culture associated with modernity is based on the need to create a consumer that would be able to absorb the excess production happily. This has shaped not only the consumer’s behaviour but the designer’s process as well. This approach cannot create artefacts that create meaningful relationships with their owners. Instead, the design ephemera created provide instant gratification and through planned obsolescence end up in landfills long before the functional end of their lifecycle. Designing for consumerism fosters a way of being in the world that is deeply problematic and unsustainable. Erich Fromm, in his 1976 book To Have or to Be? (1976), identified radical hedonism as the psychological condition of humans in modernity. For Fromm, the radical hedonism adopted by modern society can be described as a ‘having’ way of existing in the world. The nature of the having mode of existence follows the nature of private property. In this mode of existence all that matters is acquisition of property and unlimited rights to keep what has been acquired. The having mode excludes others; it does not require any further effort to keep property or to make productive use of it. In this mode of living, a human is self-referenced by identifying their property, consisting of material and immaterial possessions. One’s property constitutes self and identity.The underlying thought in the statement “I am I” is “I am I because I have X” – X being all-natural objects and persons to whom I relate myself through my power to control them, to make them permanently mine. In the having mode, there is no alive relationship between what I have and me. It and I have become things, and I have it, because I have the force to make it mine. The having mode of existence is not established by an alive, productive process between subject and object; it makes things of both object and subject. This relationship is one of deadness, not aliveness. This notion was taken even further by Situationist Guy Debord who in The Society of the Spectacle claimed that ‘Having’ is not self-referential in contemporary society, but the value of one’s possessions is judged by the value that others believe it has when they see it: “In a consumer society, social life is not about living but about having; the spectacle uses the image to convey what people need and must have. Consequently, social life moves further, leaving a state of ‘having’ and proceeding into a state of ‘appearing;’ namely the appearance of the image” (Debord, 1967, p. 7).

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The notion of a ‘Being’ state of existence – the dialectic opposite of ‘Having’ – is based on Martin Heidegger’s book Being and Time. According to Heidegger ‘Being’ is what makes humans different from others. Since ‘Being’ incorporates an understanding of what it means to be. Heidegger even uses a special word, ‘Dasein’, which can be translated as ‘being there’. This concept is unlike the dualistic Cartesian mind and body separation, it is about co-creating the two through every day immersion in reality (Heideger, 1927) Being refers to experience, and human experience is in principle not describable. This authentic mode of existence has been taken further in the context of sustainability. John Ehrenfeld defines sustainability as “the possibility that humans and other life will flourish on the Earth forever” (Ehrenfeld, 2008, p. 6). Flourishing is “the realization of a sense of completeness independent of our immediate material context” (Ehrenfeld, 2013, p. 17) It is an authentic moment of being in the world and in nature. Under this light, sustainability is a process and not a state; it is the path that leads away from the system failures we are experiencing today. It becomes clear that the unsustainable practices and worldviews of industrial capitalism are based on an instrumental view of the environment that has led to an externalisation of environmental pressures and the devaluation of ‘natural capital’ (Hawken et al., 2000) due to a poor understanding of natural limits. Additionally, the need for constant growth has given birth to the finance industry that lead to the cancerous growth of the symbolic economy and its eventual collapse. Consumerism, being a quintessential module of the system, was used to create a consumer who would absorb the excess of the industry while creating debt, a structural concept of growth. This commodity fetishism led to a new material culture based on fashion and the constant need for new ‘stuff ’ that shifted our mode of life from ‘Being’ to ‘Having’. The need to move beyond those failing practices has created many different movements with a common thread, the need for the transition towards a new society. Sustainability offers alternatives on all the different levels of the problem and can be used to encompass this wide variety of counter-culture movements. The necessary transition will come through the convergence of different bottom up initiatives not from the top tricking down to society. Sustainability has a structural element of transition, the interconnectedness of the different systems makes a creation of a solution an impossibility, and instead the goal has to be the incremental change of the sociotechnical systems in a radical direction. What becomes evident is a converging array of ideas that point towards a shift from modernity. Tony Fry refers to the shift from modernity as Sustainment. One such design approach that aims for design to play a role in larger scale social change is transition design developed by the school of design of Carnegie Melon University. Transition Design is a design methodology that acknowledges that we are living in ‘transitional times’. Again, the central premise is tied to the need for societal transitions from the modernist project towards more sustainable futures (Irwin et al., 2015). Transition Design advocates the re-conception of entire lifestyles and the ‘reconstitution of everyday life’ (Kossof and Tonkinwise, 2015), with the aim of making them more place-based, convivial and participatory and harmonising them with the natural environment. For example, the development of ‘La Borda’ a co-housing community in Barcelona that aims to create social assets within a wider community movement in La Bordeta neighbourhood in Barcelona, Catalonia (Garcia i Mateu, 2015). The nongoing co-design of the laundry service in the context of La Borda aims to both solve a very pragmatic problem whilst unlocking the diffuse design capacities of the tenants.

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Challenging the hegemonic ideology The recent policy of austerity adopted due to the global economic depression, has led to the creation of many counter-culture initiatives and creative communities around the world. Those social movements existed long before the interconnected crises of neoliberal capitalism (Harvey, 2005), but they have grown further as a response to the shortcomings of the system. The failure of the “Great promise of Limitless Progress”, as Fromm put it, coupled with the increased global empathy (Riffkin, 2009) made possible through the new ways of instant communication on the internet and social media. According to Paul Hawken’s, 2007 book Blessed Unrest, “we are experiencing the largest social movement in history, a movement that is restoring grace justice and beauty to the world” (Hawken, 2009). This movement is comprised of a plethora of different initiatives with different methods, structures and foci. One example of such a self-initiated, bottom up movement can be found in the slow food network. Slow Food is a global, grassroots organisation, founded in 1989 to prevent the disappearance of local food cultures and traditions, counteract the rise of fast life and combat people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat. Since its beginnings, Slow Food has grown into a global movement involving millions of people in over 160 countries, working to ensure everyone has access to good, clean and fair food. The local initiatives are not bound to a central organisation but instead are equal members existing within an ever-evolving framework. In a world where the industrial agriculture of GMOs destroys biodiversity, threatens food security and forces small farmers to be indebted and marginalised, slow food international is an organisation that tries to bring some grace and beauty back. We argue that all these movements share a common thread that they are working on the transition towards sustainability. Unfortunately, this transition is not an easy one. Societies are always hesitant to change and any paradigm shift involves conflict. These antagonisms can take many different forms. The two main categories can be whether they are geared towards subversive or revolutionary change. Almost all recent public uprisings (Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, 15M movement, the Gezi park protesters, etc.) begun adopting the concept of civil disobedience (Thoreau et al., 1854).These movements are wide and diverse and their convergence can be considered wishful thinking. I argue that all these movements are symptoms of the same thing, the transition towards sustainment. The different focus of different initiatives can be better put into perspective if we consider the dimensions of sustainability. The quadruple bottom line (QBL) offers an interesting tool for providing context for different movements with respect to the transition towards sustainability. The antagonistic phenomena that arise in reaction to social movements can be identified in relation to the different levels of QBL (economy, environment and self) Thus QBL, a tool for understanding sustainability, is based on the triple bottom line put forward by John Elkington in his 1997 book Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business. The main idea is that social and environmental inputs and outputs are equally important in a decision process. The QBL adds the personal meaning dimension and moves the economy dimension to the background, seeing it as a means and not the end of the design process. The QBL is rooted on human values and traditional understandings of ‘meaning’. (Walker, 2015) In this regard, it includes three incontrovertible elements of the human condition. First, we exist within a natural environment that we utilise to our own ends. Second, human nature is such that we generally choose to live in social groupings. Third, we are individual beings with a distinct

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sense of selfhood. Corresponding to these three aspects of being human are levels of meaning that can be referred to respectively as practical meaning, social meaning, and personal (or inner) meaning (Walker, 2011). This analysis extends John Hick’s proposition of natural, ethical, and religious meanings (Meltzer and Hick, 1989) so as to include not only religion but also contemporary, non-religious, or atheistic forms of spirituality. These three major facets of human meaning span physiological aspects of being human, social relationships, and personal values and spiritual growth, both religious and atheistic. The QBL encompasses these priorities and includes personal meaning (understood as spirituality plus the personal ethic and values that emerges from attention to inner growth), social responsibility, and environmental care. Economic issues, regarded as a means rather than an end. Hence, a quadruple bottom line that emphasises deeper notions of human meaning would begin to move us from a knowledge economy toward a wisdom economy. Such a direction would recognise the value of knowledge acquisition, but would place greater emphasis on priorities and practices that attain to wisdom, which appreciate the importance of the inner self, the examined life, and spiritual development. A system that values wisdom, that combines knowledge with right judgement – how we should employ that knowledge – would serve the common good through its attainment to virtue and would reduce impacts on the natural environment because it would necessarily begin to moderate the place and significance of material goods in our ideas of the ‘good’ life. One very important theory of change that is central to this study is Tony Fry’s “Redirective Practices” (Fry, 2007, 2012). Choice is central in any design process; we choose to exclude all possible futures but one that is brought into being by design. By default, we now live in a world that has been made unsustainable by design. Rather, than continuing to design without directional consequences being taken rigorously into account it is vital to have a practice that is both corrective and redirective. (Fry, 2007) Redirective practice aims to answer two crucial, but currently unasked questions “what should and should not be imposed?” And, ‘what should be created, redirected or eliminated?’ Redirective practice is finite; as such it is imbued with a process of auto-negation. What this means is that the realisation of its underpinning ambition effectively erases its raison d’ être. It is thus a means not an end – a means to take us from where we are to where we need to be. The ambition of redirective practice is to bring about the ontological designing of another ethos that can advance sustainment. Thus, its intent, as a metapractice aiming to gather converging ways of designing in order to redirect the structural and cultural condition that effects our mode of being-in-the-world. Redirective practices exist outside the field of design and for design to truly align itself with this approach, we have to look at those who redirect society away from unsustainable practices. The recent populist revolts challenge and shape the hegemonic ideology while at the same time the primary task of the hegemonic ideology is to neutralise the dimensions of these events (Žižek, 2012). Virality is a structural characteristic of all these reactions. Reports of recent episodes of social unrest and protest in around the globe have often pointed at their ‘viral’ nature and speculated on the role played by social media in their explosive growth (e.g. Almiraat, 2011; Cohen, 2011). These new media have been described as game-changing in the way that they have created a “new media ecology” that, due to their distributed nature, is very hard to control and censor. Tufekci (2011) argues that until recently repressive governments had been able to ‘quarantine’ pockets of resistance through using force selectively, preventing these local outbreaks from spreading. In other words, they were able to stifle “an oppositional information/action cascade.” However, with the proliferation of portable digital

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media, autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt were overwhelmed ‘by simultaneous and multi-channel uprisings which spread rapidly and virally. The social movements that make up the transition towards sustainability make up a mosaic of different goals, methods and foci. At the same time, all of these movements fall within the quadruple bottom line and, thus, we can identify a general direction towards sustainability in all or any of the four different levels. These movements can be found anywhere in a spectrum with subversion on one edge and revolution on the other edge, but, due to their general direction, they can all be seen as making up a greater movement. These movements take forms ranging from populist revolts to local initiatives and creative communities to NGOs and private citizens performing activism. Virality is another important characteristic of these movements as it is the primary way of reacting to the hegemonic ideology and subverting the grand narrative put forward by neoliberalism through the sharing of many disruptive micro-narratives (Lyotard, 1976). To challenge such a hierarchical order is to act under the presupposition of one’s own equality. Such action, if it is political, is going to be collective rather than individual. It will concern a group of people (or a subset of that group) who have been presupposed unequal by a particular hierarchical order, as well as those in solidarity with them, acting as though they were indeed equal to those above them in the order, and thus disrupting the social order itself. What is disrupted are not only the power arrangements of the social order, but, and more deeply, the perceptual and epistemic underpinnings of that order, the obviousness and naturalness that attaches to the order. Such a disruption is what Rancière calls a ‘dissensus’ (2010). Described this way, one can begin to see its interaction with aesthetic concerns. A dissensus is not merely a disagreement about the justice of particular social arrangements, although it is that as well. It is also the revelation of the contingency of the entire perceptual and conceptual order in which such arrangements are embedded, the contingency of what Rancière calls the partition or distribution of the sensible (le partage du sensible) (Rancière, 2010).

The role of designers in transition As far as the practice of design is concerned, a wide array of different directions has emerged. By using the QBL to categorise the focus of these emerging approaches and applications to design we are able to draw parallels between social antagonisms and design practice. On a more abstract level these new ways of designing frame the role of the design practitioner in the age of transition in order to engage in a redirective practice that enables the shift in values towards sustainability. If we apply the lessons learned by the methodologies, tactics and strategies developed by these counter-culture grassroots movements the role of designers shifts • • • •

towards Facilitators of an open, participatory process who strengthen the diffuse design capacity of people. towards Activists engaging in social innovation within creative communities towards Entrepreneurs utilising service dominant logic in the new (misfit) economy towards Craftsmen of strategy who design for sustainability.

Since the 1980s, the importance of feedback and participation from the users has been expanding in many different levels. Fuad Luke recognises the shift from Customer to Consumer to User Participant to Co-creator (2009).This shift has two important dimensions.The

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first dimension is the practical, according to Eric von Hippel in his seminal book Democratising Innovation (2005), expert users have access to ‘sticky’ information, which, due to its tacit nature, is impossible to be accessed in a vacuum. Those ‘Lead Users’ have two characteristics: they experience the needs felt by the general population of users in a particular activity or context more strongly and crucially long before the general population of users, and there is a perceived benefit to these individuals to modify or innovate in their situation. (von Hippel, 2005). In short, they are the ones that have most to gain by practical innovation. The second dimension is the ideological one. Design is a deeply political process (Bonsiepe, 1973) and as such, user participation is part of democracy in action. User participation opens up the means of production to users who would otherwise be cut out of the production process. Open design is one step further in a participatory process. Based on the GNU licence created for open source software it offers an alternative to traditional intellectual property. Open design goes beyond the creation of artefacts, it “changes relationships among the people who make, use and look after things” (Thackara, 2011, p. 42). At the same time, the open design movement has been closely tied with emerging desktop manufacturing technologies that will change the industrial production process (Rifkin, 2011). Communities are an important part of the transition. Mass participation is implied in the concept of the Wisdom of the Crowd (Surowiecki, 2004) or crowdsourcing and they are integral parts of an open co-design process that, by definition requires a community of participants in order to function. These aim to create autonomous, local narratives whilst participating in the grassroots counter-culture movement (Meroni and Bala, 2007). They are broad and take on different forms depending on the means and the goals. These movements include hacking, heresy, fan fiction, small change, professional-amateurs (Busch, 2008), design activism, design for social change slow design meta-design, open design (Fuad Luke, 2009), These communities of co-creators trend towards collaboration, self-organising and collectivism which is partly due to the virality of their nature as discussed earlier. Disruption is a very important aspect of these communities. The democratisation of the design process requires that designers change their role in the process. Designers can no longer be “locked up in an ivory tower” and design in a vacuum. Instead, they need to participate and guide communities as an expert and a mentor. Another facet of the emerging role of the designer is that of the entrepreneur. A new economy is emerging, an economy that is built on minimising the negative impacts of the current economic model. Crowdfunding is an important intersection of design and the new economy. “Crowdfunding involves an open call, essentially through the Internet, for the provision of financial resources either in form of donations (without rewards) or in exchange for some form of reward and/or voting rights in order to support initiatives for specific purposes” (Belleflamme et al., 2013, p. 588). The two main characteristics of a crowdfunded project are ‘Connectivity’ and the creation of a ‘Temporary Community of Makers’ (Mortati and Villari, 2013) that enables a distributed microproduction of goods (Bianchini and Maffei, 2013). Another shift in the economy is the rise of the ‘misfit’ or informal economy (Neuwirth, 2011), these black, grey, and informal economies are developing solutions to a myriad of challenges. Far from being “deviant entrepreneurs” that pose threats to our social and economic stability, these innovators display remarkable ingenuity, pioneering original methods and practices that we can learn from and apply to move formal markets. This disruptive creation enables the design and implementation of solutions that are otherwise outside the system. This once again is part of the reaction and the struggle against the transition. All these new tools are

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growing; in the UK between 2011 and 2013, 1.74 billion British pounds were raised through the Alternative finance market (Nesta, 2013). Designers as entrepreneurs have also added the tools and methodologies to generate business models and strategies. The shift towards strategy is a relatively new phenomenon in design. The value of design thinking in supporting strategic decisions is well documented (Brown, 2009). Design thinking offers the tools to understand frame and overcome the problem situation in a holistic and comprehensive way whilst increasing participation and adopting different perspectives. Finally, craft is the last characteristic of the emerging role of designers. Service dominant logic is an important aspect of design, as it offers a systemic overview of the problem situation. All forms of design can be approached in this logic in two ways: first, the product needs to be assessed in the context of the user, the market etc., thus its design goes beyond the design of a physical artefact (product-function as a service). Second, the act of design is a service. Four main characteristics of services have been identified: Intangibility, Inseparability, Heterogeneity, and Perishability (Parasuraman et al., 1985). These characteristics, tied with the mass customisation notion, which is part of open design, and the need for activities on a human, local scale point towards a craft approach to design. Craft can become a transformative force. Practitioners must develop a critically informed, practice-based commitment to assert the sustaining value within craft.That is to say, craft practitioners must learn to facilitate the Redirection of their own practice, in order for craft to become a force for Sustainment (Fry, 2009). The creation of unique product-service solutions that are co-designed with local creative communities in tandem with a global wisdom of the crowds and funded through the new economy is a direction closely tied with challenging the practices that brought us here as well as enabling local communities to flourish and proving that the alternative to modernity exists if we are willing to challenge past assumptions.

Conclusions The transition towards sustainability is directly tied with system failures on different levels. The quadruple bottom line offers a robust basis for deconstructing and categorising all aspects of the dialogue between the past and the future. As is the case in any complex system the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and simply deconstructing the problem situation is not enough. The interactions, divergences, and convergences between different parts of the system are equally important. Design plays an important role in enabling the transition towards sustainability for many reasons. It is directly tied with the material culture, it is responding to the need for greater participation and more democracy, it is responsible for many of the environmental pressures and can help avoid them. However, the transition towards sustainability is not simply a design matter but shifting the role of designers to that described can pull communities in that direction. We are witnessing an ideological war between neoliberalism and the emergence of an alternative system of values. In recent years, we have started to see cases of promising sharing and collaborative practices falling into the traps of neoliberal ways of thinking and doing: carpooling and time-banking ideas transforming into the likes of Uber and TaskRabbit, cohousing concepts producing closed and exclusive gated communities, and so on. How can we prevent the social potential of sharing practices from being neutralised by the power of the neoliberal ideas and economy? How can promising collaborative practices

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spread while maintaining their social value, which is to contribute in the transition towards a resilient and sustainable society? The innovative tools created based around the shift from value in exchange to value in use are a double-edged sword; they can foster a collaborative utopian society or create the worst neoliberal dystopia where work or even life is perceived as a service. All of these new exciting approaches that we discussed in this chapter have the same capacity.They can create and destroy.The burden of choice lies on the designers who will use them. Within the system of values of neoliberalism, it is impossible to imagine how these tools can enable designers to act as agents of positive change. Creating and communicating these divergent solutions that are able to work within an alternative system of values whilst providing answers to problems of everyday life can provide a proof of concept of utopia and allow the critical mass to overcome the cultural barriers that block the pathway towards sustainment. Given the unprecedented social and environmental pressures there is little room for debate about the need for change. For this transition to be meaningful, our actions need to be less reactive and more active. Putting forward a new system of values and experimenting with new ideas is a path that leads to a new and unknown future, whereas reacting to the continuous failures of the system can merely fix the system and keep us on the path carved by modernity. This does not mean going back to agrarian communities, but instead finding ways to address the environmental societal and political issues that we face.

References Almiraat, H. (2011). Egypt:Videos Are Worth a Million Words. Global Voices, 28 January 2011. Belleflamme, P., Lambert,T., & Schwienbacher, A. (2013). Crowdfunding:Tapping the right crowd. Journal of Business Venturing, 29(5), pp. 585–609. Bianchini, M., & Maffei, S. (2013). Microproduction Everywhere: Defining the Boundaries of the Emerging New Distributed Microproduction Socio-Technical Paradigm. Social Frontiers: The Next Edge of Social Innovation Research, pp. 1–21. Bonsiepe, G. (1973). Precariousness and Ambiguity: Industrial Design in Dependent Countries. In Design for Need, eds. Bicknell, J. and McQiston. London: Pergamon Press. Boulanger, P. M. (2010). Three strategies for sustainable consumption. S.A.P.I.EN.S, 3(2). Brown,T. (2009). Change by Design – How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. New York: Harper Collins Publishers. Busch, O. (2008). Fashion-able. Göteborg: School of Design and Crafts (HDK), Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg. Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Cohen, J. (2011). Photo of Egyptian Saying ‘I Love Facebook’ GoesViral. Allfacebook.com, 4 February 2011. Ehrenfeld, J. R. (2008). Sustainability by Design: A Subversive Strategy for Transforming our Material Culture. New Haven:Yale University Press. Ehrenfeld, J. R., & Hoffman, A. J. (2013). Flourishing: A Frank Conversation About Sustainability. Sheffield: Greenleaf Publishing. Elkington, J. (1997). Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century. Michigan: New Society Publishers Fromm, E. (1976). To Have or to Be? New York: Continuum. Fry, T. (2004). The voice of sustainment: Design ethics as futuring. Design Philosophy Papers, 2(2), pp. 145–156. Fry, T. (2007). Redirective practice: An elaboration. Design Philosophy Papers, 5(1), pp. 5–20. Fry, T. (2009). Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice. Sydney: UNSW Press. Fuad-Luke, A. (2009). Design Activism:The Beautiful Strangeness of a Sustainable World. London: Earthscan.

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Garcia i Mateu, A. (2015). Designing with Transitioning Communities: The Case of La Borda, Thesis Project, Eina School of Art and Design, Autonomous University of Barcelona, September 2015. Gorz, A. (2010). Ecologica. London & New York: Seagull Books. Graebe, D. (2012). Debt, the First 5000 Years. New York: Melville House. Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hawken, P., Lovins, A. B., & Lovins, H. (2000). Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Heideger, M. (1927). Being and Time. London: SCM Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1962). The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848. Athens: National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation Irwin, T., Kossoff, G., & Tonkinwise, C. (2015). Transition design provocation. Design Philosophy Papers, 13(1), pp. 3–11. Jevons, W. S. (1865). The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lyotard, J. F. (1976). The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Malthus T. R. (1798). An Essay on the Principle of Population. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meadows, D. H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers & William W. Behrens III. (1972). Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books. Meltzer, E. S., & Hick, J. (Eds.). (1989). Three Faiths – One God: A Jewish, Christian, Muslim Encounter. New York: Springer. Meroni, A., & Bala, P. (2007). Creative Communities: People Inventing Sustainable Ways of Living. Milano: Edizioni POLI.design. Mortati, M., & Villari, B. (2013). Connected Communities Of Makers. In 10th European Academy of Design Conference – Crafting the Future. Neuwirth, R. (2011). Stealth of Nations:The Global Rise of the Informal Economy. New York: Anchor Books. Packard,V., & McKibben, B. (2011). The Waste Makers. Minneapolis: Consortium Book Sales & Dist. Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V. A., & Berry, L. L. (1985). A conceptual model of service quality and its implications for future research. The Journal of Marketing, 41–50. Rancière, J. (2010). Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Rifkin, J. (2011). The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shedroff, N. (2009). Design Is the Problem:The Future of Design Must Be Sustainable, New Yrok: Rosenfeld. Surowiecki, J. (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. New York: Anchor Books. Thackara, J. (2011). Into the open. In Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive, eds. Van Abel, B., Evers, L., Troxler, P., & Klaassen, R. Amsterdam: BIS publishers. Thoreau, H. D., Merwin, W. S., & Howarth, W. (2012). Walden, or, Life in the Woods, and “Civil Disobedience.” New York: Signet Classics. Tufekci (2011). Faster is Different: Brief Presentation at Theorizing the Web, 2011, Technosociology, 13 April 2011.Vol. 4. von Hippel, E. (2005). Democratizing Innovation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Walker, S. (2006a). Object lessons: enduring artifacts and sustainable solutions. Design Issues, 22(1), pp. 20–31. Walker S. (2006b). Sustainable by Design, Explorations in Theory and Practice. London: Earthscan. Walker, S. (2011). The Spirit of Design: Objects, Environment, and Meaning. Abingdon, OX and New York: Earthscan. Žižek, S. (2012). The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. London:Verso.

13 UNDESIGNING BORDERS Urban spaces of borders and counter-practices of looking Mahmoud Keshavarz

We did not cross the border, the border crossed us! ‑ US Immigrant Rights Movement Slogan

Are you undocumented? Haven’t got residency? Between the 13th and 26th of October an operation called ‘ Mos Maiorum’ starts in Sweden and E.U. The Police will hunt people without papers and residency.They want to know from which routes immigrants come to Europe and they will arrest as many people as possible. Be careful at the subway stations, the trains, airports, highways and at the borders. The above is an excerpt from information produced in seven languages and widely circulated through leaflets, posters, SMS and social media networks in European countries during September and October 2014. Activists were warning travellers without the ‘right’ papers and undocumented migrants moving across Europe to be careful about a joint operation of ID-checks. Mos Maiorum, a Latin expression meaning ancestral customs or the habits of our ancestors, was yet another round of joint immigration raid operations, this time initiated by Italy and conducted by national police in each member state of the EU. During this time, the police intensified its ID-checks and specific operations for finding undocumented migrants, visa over-stayers and irregular border crossers. This was nothing new. As the EU is a legally passport-free territory, these types of stop and search operations have been inevitable parts of the production of a passport-free zone – aka the Schengen space – from its very inception (Hydén and Lundberg, 2004). Thus, the police have always been engaged in internal stop and search operations to intercept migrants who have managed to get into Europe irregularly. Undocumented migrants are those without a residence permit authorising their stay in transit countries or the country of destination. They may have been unsuccessful in the asylum procedure, have overstayed their visa or have entered ‘irregularly’. The routes to becoming an undocumented migrant are complex and often the result of policies and discriminatory procedures over which the migrant has little or no control. For instance, in the case of asylum seekers, after having their asylum applications ‘rejected’ because of the lack of evidence for a ‘well founded’ fear to be recognised as a ‘genuine asylum seeker’, failed asylum seekers have to leave the country by the deadline imposed upon them by the authorities. Afraid of

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deportation, they go clandestine – a discriminatory and potentially exploitative condition – which shapes their everyday lives and can last for several years. It is within such conditions that undocumented migrants encounter various global and local borders stretched spatially and oriented temporally in different scales, shapes and forms beyond those of walls and fences. In this chapter, by discussing a specific national project of internal borderwork in Sweden, called REVA running from 2011 to 2014 and bringing stories of those who are affected by it, I argue that borders are not mere geographical lines of separations, divisions and differences. They are design spaces of production, circulation and consumption of images and relations. While borders frame certain moments and events as natural, catastrophic or normal, they deframe their own presence and politics persuasively. Borders as spaces produce and sustain certain normalised ways of looking that allow them, paradoxically, to skip the sight. One way to resist these spaces of violence and exclusion is to envision counter-practices of looking at borders, to articulate other ways of looking at borders, at what borders could be, where they operate and how they move in time and space. These counter-practices of looking will help us trace the movement of borders to spaces not traditionally seen as relevant or necessary to borders. To make this clear I will discuss an example of the counter-practices of looking. This project is one way of practicing what I understand as ‘undesigning’ borders in the everyday life of two Swedish towns, where the police were heavily engaged in a series of racial profiling operations to find undocumented and deportable migrants.

Ubiquitous borderworks: delocalisation of borders In stark contrast to the celebration and expectation of a borderless world in the post-Cold War era, globalisation has resulted in one of the most intensive periods of bordering in the history of the world (Jones and Johnson, 2014). On one level, we are witnessing the massive proliferation of border walls and fences on geographical boundaries of nations-states worldwide. In 2013, approximately 20,000 km of the world’s borders were marked with walls or barriers and an additional 18,000 km were ‘hardened’ but remained unfenced (Rosière and Jones, 2012). By 2015, at least 70 security barriers were planned, initiated or expanded worldwide. This is four times more than the number of those built during the entire course of the Cold War (Vallet, 2014). On another level, a set of bordering practices have increased beyond international boundaries and within the space of nation-states, Mos Maiorum being one example. In recent critical border studies literature, external and internal borders have been discussed as delocalised entities that are constantly moving and reinforcing each other mutually. The motion and movement of borders in spaces and times other than those conventionally perceived as rigid borders or lines dividing two political territories, have been captured in concepts such as ‘rebordering’ (Andreas, 2003), ‘delocalisation of borders’ (Bigo, 2002; Salter, 2004) and the ‘ubiquity of borders’ (Balibar, 2002). Some scholars have investigated the delocalisation and movement of borders in specific sites and places in greater detail (Walters, 2004; Coleman, 2007; Amoore, 2006). Alison Mountz, scholar of political geography, in particular has focused on how the movement of borders is parallel to the “intensified mobility of the port of entry”, where “sometimes these ports emerge offshore to preclude entry, and other times they operate onshore as an accelerated path to detention and deportation” (Mountz, 2011, p. 319). These ports of entries are material entities defining an entry to sovereignty (e.g. checkpoints at borders) but are designed and planned to be mobile enough

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to delocalise borders while they mobilise the states and their borders (e.g. visa applications at embassies). The fact that borders are articulated through scattered and ubiquitous material practices such as border patrols, security companies, ID-checks, passports, visa regimes, databanks, checkpoints, coast guards, etc., affirms that borders are not merely lines of demarcation on the shores of political space anymore, but are rather spaces for the production of im/mobility. These spaces are most often design spaces, ready to be articulated, planned and managed in one way or another to produce practices, performances and interactions as well as values, meanings and narratives. Borders articulated through artefacts and artefactual relations are partly designed to frame certain bodies and are partly left seemingly un-designed, or anticipated (Balibar, 2009), in order to shape hegemonic spaces of uncertainty for catching bodies and things that are not technically or legally to be caught in a given situation.This contradicts one of the most established truths in border studies that “a border that is not visible to all has failed its purpose” (van Schendel, 2005, p. 41). Borders are not always seen, treated and understood as borders. They are often “designed not to look like borders, located in one place but projected in another entirely” (Rumford, 2011). It seems that borders in the shape and articulated form of space are better devices for policing and regulating a variety of things, bodies and processes whose common feature is their ‘mobility’ (Adey, 2004). Thus, as Jörg Dürrschmidt and Graham Taylor (2007, p. 56) write, borders are increasingly becoming mechanisms to “control mobility rather than territory.” Borders protecting a polity by regulating mobility are complemented by a designable space capable of speeding up some passages while blocking others, according to requirements. Such design space is shaped by what William Walters calls ‘firewalls’ (2006), barriers that allow for the free flow of certain goods and people, while restricting the movement of others.This is in fact how ‘borderworks’ through a simultaneous debordering and rebordering operate, taking the form of design practices that are seemingly unrelated to borders. Borderworks as defined by Chris Rumford (2009), are all those practices of bordering, debordering and rebordering that are not only produced and performed by traditional actors like the state, but also by citizens and non-citizens who can contest and articulate their own versions of borders. In short, borderwork is no longer the exclusive preserve of the nation-state.Various actors ranging from states to international and business sectors, cultural, humanitarian and activist actors, are all involved in borderwork. However, the types of space they produce and the possibilities of access and control they offer for different groups distinguish them from each other in the politics they perform.

REVA: racialisation of urban mobility In Sweden, activists called Mos Maiorum, ‘Mega-REVA’, thereby accentuating the existing ties between national and supranational practices of borderwork. REVA was a collaborative project that took place from 2011 to 2014 and was initiated by the Swedish police, the Swedish Migration Board (Migrationsverket) and the Prison and Probation Service (Kriminalvårdens transporttjänst) in response to a request by the government. The project was co-funded by the European Return Fund. REVA aimed to search for, arrest and deport undocumented migrants. By January 2013, REVA came to be well known by the public due to its largescale operations in the underground stations of Stockholm to find and arrest undocumented migrants.

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Davoud, a young Afghan man, whom I met in Iran in 2012, told me that late one night, in a neighbourhood close to one of the social housing projects in Malmö, the police stopped him and asked for his ID. His undocumented status at the time led to his detention and subsequent deportation to Afghanistan after living in Sweden for five years. For three of these five years, he lived under the harsh conditions of being undocumented without or with partial access to education, health care and work. One month after his deportation to Afghanistan, Davoud managed to cross irregularly the border back into Iran with the hope of finding his way back to Sweden. When we met in Tehran in August 2012, he was not in a good way and was constantly regretting being close to an area associated with police stop and search operations. He was blaming himself for his decision to take a walk “in the wrong place at the wrong time” as he said. He had just two months left to overcome his undocumentedness, before he would have been allowed to reapply for asylum. Undocumented migrants in Sweden, like Davoud, have to take great care not to do anything ‘wrong’ because they cannot afford to make mistakes. Any mistake, such as riding the underground without a ticket, or more mundane infractions such as riding a bike without a light, forgetting to put both feet on the ground to make a full stop at a junction when cycling, or leaning on a car and accidentally setting off its alarm, can all attract the attention of the police. These simple and banal acts might all of sudden render those bodies visible to the sight of the police. Ironically, an undocumented migrant “exemplifies the impeccable citizen” (Khosravi, 2010, p. 91). This makes it hard for the police to choose and filter undocumented migrants from others in an urban space or in the internal space of a nation-state, where no ordinary checkpoints are installed. Thus, the police have to design and run a whole other series of searches, targets, checks and arrests of possible undocumented migrants based on the usage of urban infrastructures and institutions and the possibility that they may offer for the inhabitation and performance of such practices. One of the most common of these practices is racial profiling in the flow of urban mobility. Rather than moving and going after their targets, the police stay in mobile sites such as underground and train stations and constantly stop those mobile and possibly illegalised bodies.The practice of racial profiling, which is supposedly prohibited by Swedish law, affirms the racialised aspect of undocumentedness: that undocumentedness, besides being an economic and legal issue for the authorities, is indeed a fundamentally racialised condition, which produces frameworks for state racism.The police have to reinforce racialisation in order to define who is legal and who is not. Consequently, the police tend to check those whose appearances do not match the common image of legal bodies: that is, white bodies on the move. It is clear from an account given by Angela, a Swedish citizen with parents from Latin America, that the police not only checked her ID but also her Swedishness. She was on her way home from Stockholm University one weekend when three police officers approached her in Slussen underground station. The first one asked her in English if she spoke Swedish, and another asked how she had come here (Sweden) and for how long she had lived here (Swedish Radio, 2013). Yamina, another woman who was stopped at the same underground station, clarifies in an interview with Swedish Radio (2013) how the police – by initiating this act of stop-and-check – took her Swedishness away from her based on her appearance. The police asked her if her passport was real, or if she had bought it in Botkyrka, a suburb south of Stockholm where she was born. “No! It is made in Solna [where the Swedish police issue passports], but thank you for your racist comment. Can I get my passport back?”, she replied to them.Yamina stated that she would always be a suburban immigrant and remain stigmatised

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for the rest of her life no matter how Swedish she became: “Eventually I am just a ‘svartskalle’ (black skull – a degrading and racist term used for migrants in Sweden).” When borders are enacted legally on those who are inside a territory ‘illegally’ and in spaces not seemingly known as border zones or lands, then those who are actually deemed citizens, find themselves turned into quasi-citizens. The Swedish police’s questioning of Yamina’s passport is illuminating in this sense. As Shahram Khosravi (2013), anthropologist, writes in the context of REVA, “the racialised profile of a so-called illegal migrant reminded many Swedes (born in Sweden or Swedish citizen since long time ago) that the state still does not recognise them as real Swedes.” While very different in terms of consequences and effects compare to undocumented migrants, nonetheless the racial profiling of citizens to check their legality, points to the highly racialised condition of bordering and citizenship in Europe. Borderwork within REVA thus functioned not simply by devising and regulating who is legally residing here and who is not, but more importantly, how citizenship is constituted through borderwork in underground stations, bicycle paths, schools, hospitals, gyms or at a bus stop in a suburb late at night.

The sight of REVA What made REVA a hot topic in the entire country was the spectacle it produced and the borderworks it circulated. It measured the public’s tolerance to being a spectator to border enforcement. The project has become a national platform for discussing illegality, a form of national border spectacle. Because it was mostly conducted in underground and city train stations, it allowed the public to see the enforcement of borders over non-white bodies. REVA, in practice, inhabited ‘automobilities’ in order to perform its enforcement more efficiently. Mimi Sheller and John Urry (2000, p. 744) define the term as an assemblage or articulation of cars, roads, buildings and other physical infrastructures that allow ‘users’ of cities to “live their lives in particular spatially stretched and time-compressed ways.” For them, automobility is not a given concept and allows for both the dispersion and fragmentation of city life as well as for certain privileged individuals and groups to better “juggle tiny fragments of time in order to put together complex, fragile, and contingent patterns of social life” (ibid). This definition clarifies that those without automobiles or those who are dependent on public transport will then be much less successful at ‘juggling’ this fragmented space in order to live. The space produced by urban infrastructure is thus readily available to borderwork at any moment, by adding a small feature or actor to the articulations. A poster, a new feature added to the RFID (Radio Frequency Identification Device) underground card or a police body, can powerfully and effectively work to reborder an underground station and thus produce new spectacles. Because undergrounds and stations are passage points in urban mobility, they can easily be turned into checkpoints by projects such as REVA. However, as these articulations of mobility and immobility are constantly performed in space and time, they also offer the possibility of momentary rearticulations. During REVA, protests were held at stations, which made the effect of the protests stronger as they were staged in a closed place and were an imposition on the crowds in motion within a more intimate space of encounter. One example was how individuals and activists used the reverse sides of advertisement posters inside underground carriages to inform people about REVA and the police operation of ID-checks. These are strategies of revealing the sites of borderwork as well as providing information to protect those who might potentially be harassed by such operations. Angela Stuesse and Mathew Coleman

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FIGURE 13.1 An

example of altermobility in Stockholm undergrounds during REVA operations.

Photo: courtesy of Laura Luna, February 25, 2013, www.twitter.com/misslauraluna

(2014) suggest, based on their research on the creative practices of movement-building among migrant communities in the US to survive, resist and contest heightened immigrant policing, that we may call these strategies ‘altermobilities’. However, it is important to stress that these strategies also produced a set of self-policing and self-regulating procedures, which made many undocumented migrants remain at home. REVA, in general, shaped a condition of defining which bodies are always already legal and which bodies might potentially be ‘illegal’. This happened within the context of urbanity and urban infrastructure, particularly in underground stations. This made some spaces and sites look and work more like borders than others in the experience of those mobile at a given time and place. As Mats Franzén (2001) writes, the experience of a particular city is “determined, at least partially, by the unintended, and cumulative, consequence of all border controls” (p. 206). The borderwork conducted in and through urban infrastructure produces patterns of mobility within the urban space, in which certain spaces of borders shape new realities for the town’s undocumented inhabitants. Borderwork in the urban space thus not only determines how a city works, but also how a city is able to offer borderwork. It is about the simultaneous production and consumption of borderworks, which need to be combined with what a city offers. It is about imbuing the everyday life of the town with securitisation where the latter can be replaced by the former and legitimise itself as normal.

Spectacle of borders and a shift in practices of looking One particular way to discuss the complexity, diffusion and movement of borderwork is through the spectacle it makes: sometimes unintended and sometimes anticipated, sometimes

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planned and designed and sometimes contingent over time and space. Moreover, in recent years specific ‘practices of looking’ (Sturken and Cartwright, 2001) have dominated the discussion of migration: statistics, maps, documentary films and images circulate on a massive scale. It seems that the public understanding of irregular migration is mainly shaped by certain practices of looking, which are determined by certain frames that are produced consciously and unconsciously. These images and discourses supply the rationale for what Nicholas De Genova calls “the border spectacle”, a spectacle of “enforcement at ‘the’ border, whereby migrant ‘illegality’ is rendered spectacularly visible” (2013, p. 1181). The spectacle, according to him, is enmeshed through a combination of material practices and a dense weaving of discourse and representation. However, the spectacle is not autonomous. Things come together and become a spectacle when they are looked upon in a way that can be appropriated, exchanged and consumed. Therefore, the spectacle is not about a collection of images, but about how they perform and repeat their presence, shaping social relations mediated through images or visualities (Debord, 1995 [1967], p. 19). To put it better, it is about a specific regime of visibility that is shaped by certain material practices and consequently shapes other practices, both material and immaterial. The instances of borderwork presented so far in the case of REVA, remind us that borders are also legitimised, normalised and produced through visual regimes, establishing certain scenes and sites to be looked at and consumed, while forgetting about other sites, places and spaces. This is not about what is seen through a frame and what is left unseen, but about what the frame is, how it is designed and who performs it, moves it and has the power of fabrications over it. Judith Butler (2009), in her discussion of frames and framing, argues that to question a frame is not just about asking what a frame shows, but how it shows what it shows. The ‘how’ not only organises the image, the story and the history, but also works to organise our sensitivity and thinking through defining and confining our field of perception (p. 71). Frames thus articulate certain regimes of perception.The important point Butler makes is that the task is not “to locate what is ‘in’ or ‘outside’ the frame, but what vacillates between those two locations, and what, foreclosed, becomes encrypted in the frame itself ” (p. 75). Because of this, spaces of borders are, in practice, the spaces between the two or more locations that are shaped by and around borderworks. The spaces of borders become the norm, circulate and cut through bodies when they become part of the frame, which is in fact about material practices of visuality and spectatorships, about how by becoming the frame, borders define our field of perception and our understanding of the legality and illegality of movement. Moreover, by becoming the frame, they disappear from sight. While they produce visuality, sight and spectatorship, since they are the frames, they manage to keep themselves out of sight. As De Genova writes “the border spectacle works its magic trick of displacing ‘illegality’ from its point of production (in the law) to the proverbial ‘scene of the crime’, which is of course also the scene of ostensible crime-fighting” (De Genova, 2013, p. 1189). Border spectacle thus is a specific regime of visibility, visuality and visualisation. Visualisation and visuality according to Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011), scholar of visual culture, is an exclusive claim on the ability to look. In its ontological condition, it is an authoritarian act of visual configuration of the field, or rather the space, to define and promote which things are to be looked at, and which things are not. Building his theory on the work of Jacques Rancière, visualisation according to him occurs when the police say to us: “Move along! There’s nothing to see here!” (Rancière, 2010, p. 37).This is not censorship, but rather the very

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practice of visualisation producing visuality, in configuring the space of visible and invisible, the space of perception and persuasion and consequently presenting such space as normal or given. According to Mirzoeff, the “ability to assemble a visualisation manifests the authority of the visualizer. In turn, the authorising of authority requires permanent renewal in order to win consent as the ‘normal’ or everyday because it is always already contested” (p. 474). In the case of REVA, the practice of targeting a body and taking it to one side in the corner of a station to check its legality means the creation of a separation between that body and others. However, more than this, what the police have been engaged in was a set of productions of visuality, which remind Swedish society of the separation that exists between individuals in terms of their membership of a given space of society. REVA’s visualisation intensifies the racialised divide between citizens and undocumented migrants and leads to a space of a border that can be consumed whenever a white Swede looks at a non-white person suspected of being an undocumented migrant. Spaces of borders do a set of things to borders, frames and visualisation. First, they frame how we can look at borders; second, they enable certain parts of society to look through that specific frame and thus exercise their authority in looking in a particular way; third, by being part of the frame, they manage to keep themselves invisible from sight. Furthermore, Mirzoeff, by paying attention to the historical practices of refusal, argues how these practices claim a right to look, an autonomous position to produce dissensus in the field of perception: “The right to look is the claim to a subjectivity that has the autonomy to arrange the relations of the visible and the sayable” (p. 474). Following the relationships of such rearticulations into what has been shown or perceived as the normal or the real, Mirzoeff clarifies that the right to look “is not simply a matter of assembled visual images but the grounds on which such assemblages can register as meaningful renditions of a given event” (p. 477). By taking the idea of the right to look into the contested spaces of borders, I argue that a shift in our practices of looking is necessary in order to create opportunities to follow the movement of borders and the spaces they produce, rather than the movement of bodies who cross borders. As these spaces are design spaces that allow for certain groups and actors to practice their authority through the power of design and visualisation, it becomes important to sketch out other possibilities and practices of looking at these spaces. These other possible practices of looking should counter those practices of looking which the state and semi-state actors provide to citizens. By changing these practices of looking, one might be able to see how the borders and the spaces they produce actually expand, circulate and cut through certain bodies on the move. Consequently, what comes to sight, are the ways that states mobilise things, people, urban infrastructures like subway system and natural resources like the sea to immobilise and criminalise certain mobilities. This, then, is the opposite to that image of criminalised and/or victimised migrants who cross lines or spaces of borders. The task is to expose those frames that borderworks use to make a spectacle out of certain bodies and sites while keeping the frames invisible and hidden.To expose those hidden frames is to articulate counter-practices of looking. The next section is a discussion of an on-going work carried out by myself and a few others aimed at exposing those frames through a set of interventions, performances and workshops. This project proposes a systematic framing of borderworks in the cities of Malmö and Stockholm and thus defines the field of perception by claiming the right to look based on the production and promotion of counter-practices of looking. Border-Framing-Dot-Eu is a project aimed at documenting, archiving, historicising and framing those moments and spaces in which borders appear and disappear continuously.

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Border-framing-Dot-Eu: framing the patterns of urban immobility This is an on-going platform for framing the sites of racial profiling and internal border checks carried out by police forces to find undocumented migrants. It was initially started by myself and Christina Zetterlund and Johanna Lawengrad. The idea of Border-Framing-Dot-Eu was formed in 2012, and REVA’s large-scale attack on the city of Stockholm in 2013 pushed us to implement it as soon as possible. Border-Framing-Dot-Eu consists of a kit, a website and a group of performers who use the kit and website to archive, frame and possibly narrate how borderworks has become a part of urban life for certain bodies. The kit includes a yellow-red barricade tape bearing the legend “CAUTION BORDER DO NOT CROSS BORDER”; a map of the sites where police have carried out their ambushing strategy of racial profiling or raids to find deportable migrants; it also contains a small paper plaque describing the event, date and time of the police operation. The rest of the materials are often tools to facilitate the process of setting up quickly and efficiently such as scissors, sticky tapes, ropes, etc. So far, the project has been performed in two ways and is open to its transformation. One way of working with it is through quick interventions such as full days of action in Malmö or Stockholm, where a group of volunteers can mark out sites where the racial profiling, arrest and consequently deportation of undocumented migrants occurs. Another way is a relatively slow and interrogative process through which a group of participants will use one day to conduct research about particular sites, their relation to history and other borderworks close to the same site. To make this clear, I will describe two possible ways of working with the project separately.

FIGURE 13.2 The

Photo: author

first kit used for actions

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I From time to time I make calls to members of Asylgruppen – the Asylum Group – a local activist group supporting the rights of asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented migrants active in Malmö – asking if they would be interested in gathering and marking the places of racial profiling. These places are often identified through a simple system. An SMS tree has been set up through which members of the group can send warnings out about any incidents they witness in the town. The SMS will be automatically delivered to everyone and acts as a

FIGURE 13.3 Photos

from the first action in Malmö in June 2013

Photo: courtesy of border-framing dot-eu

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warning to avoid certain streets and local sites. Thus the map is made out of these SMS messages. The content of the plaque being put up on the site detailing what has happened at that specific site is also the content of the SMS in circulation. After setting up and marking a particular site by attaching the plaque to the site, the participants take photos and document that very particular site now being marked with tapes and plaques by uploading a photo to the website, generating an index of police operations. Individuals can also order the kit from the website, carry out the framing of borderworks themselves and upload photos of their framing onto the website. In the two collective actions that have taken place so far, in June 2013 and November 2014, the participants were citizen and non-citizen activists from Asylgruppen and Aktion mot Deportation (Action against Deportation) in Malmö. We, the performers, were able to mark and frame 42 sites of police operation within the inner city of Malmö.

II With minor changes to the kit, new possibilities for a different set of performances are offered. The second version of the kit includes ‘border-log cards’ and ID markers. In this second iteration, the performance aims for a relatively slow, interrogative approach to the sites. The idea is to start with a site of racial profiling, identified by a map given to performers. This will be considered as the main event of the investigation. The performers must then search for other historical and material evidence related to borderworks and mark them accordingly. They have to document each item found on the site and write them down on designated borderlog cards, provide their own reading and how it is related to the actual event of racial profiling or internal border checks. So far, the second version of the project has been carried out with two groups of students, once at the Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm and once at Malmö University. The students were handed the kit and asked to go to actual sites chosen from the map, mark the site and observe other material entities around the site to find potential evidence related to borderworks. They had at least five hours for carrying out one investigation in relation to one specific site. By using the familiar red-yellow barricade tape that so often warns against an occurrence at a particular site and the repetitions of such use across the inner city of Malmö, we tried to make the patterns of its appearance visible through a nearly invisible tape. This is because mobile publics often dismiss red-yellow barricade tape as a separate site of activity for destruction or construction.These tapes of yellow-red colouring have become so ubiquitous in various activities in town that people do not pay much attention to them, which ironically is also the case when an undocumented migrant gets arrested. The arrest is made in a way that does not garner that much attention. By this, the aim was to point out borderworks and the spaces it produces, spaces that are unseen by citizens. These were then about framing a pattern of urban immobility inscribed so densely into urban mobility. These repetitive red and yellow tapes, framing a seemingly ‘empty’ site, produce frames that invite mobile publics to look at banal places in urban infrastructure as sites of borderworks. More explicitly, these frames make visible the pattern of borderworks present in the city and materialise the borderworks of police after they leave the site. This consequently shows how these urban borderworks articulate the space and time of inhabitation in Malmö for certain bodies.

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During the performance, when the framing and marking of the sites led to closing certain passages or limiting access to certain parts of the city, a question was frequently raised: How do we do this in a way that does not endanger certain groups such as disabled people and children, who, by having their paths blocked are put at risk? This moment was telling as it affirmed how in our ‘accepted’ ethical and political frameworks, blocking the passage of certain groups is not only illegal but also unethical, whereas blocking the free passage of undocumented migrants is not only legal but also desired and supported by many politicians and citizens. The red and yellow barricade tape, the website as well as border-logs cards form an archive. They allow for certain ways of writing history through the material frames they offer. These archives could be discussed as an archive belonging to the ‘national’ history of Sweden. By making an archive of border-working of habitation in Malmö and Stockholm through the events happening to undocumented migrants because of their illegalisation, we tried to introduce counter-practices of looking as well as forming counter-archives to national and official archives. At the same time, and in the long term, it aims to make an archive of how the city is not only organised according to mobility but also the immobility of certain groups. In this sense, it is a series of material testimonies that seeks to bring instability to the other archives, the archives of the police, Migration Board and other official and legal archives of bodies that are removed from Swedish territory.This can be understood as a method for writing counterhistory and making counter-archives through counter-practices of looking at such events: “by marking these places, a pattern of the nation-state border system within the everyday life of

FIGURE 13.4 Collaged

Image: author

Image of the extended and continuous tape over the city of Malmö

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the city is drawn. It is a design that fluctuates inside and outside of the frame. It makes the frame an evident entity. It is a method of framing and materialising the borders” (Keshavarz and Zetterlund, 2013, p. 30). This initiative is an example of how by designing counter-visuality one can invite the public to look at borders differently and to see borderworks beyond the ways in which the state and non-state actors frame and visualise it.This is one way of undesigning borders. Undesigning in this sense is about undoing certain visualisations produced by spaces of borders through practicing the right to look. As discussed in this chapter, borders and borderworks are believed and consumed through their appearance and spectacle. They are also consumed in a normal way due to their capacities of unconditional movement and it is this that makes them effective. Undesigning borders then is about strategic design intervention in the visual regimes produced by borders. It might be the case that these interventions are not able to abolish the ‘illegalisation’ and criminalisation of border transgression. The illegalisation of certain mobility and bodies will not disappear as long as the laws protecting the politics and economics of what constitute a desirable and undesirable migration or mobility are in place. However, without those material and visual practices of borderwork, citizens would not be able to consume and believe in the ‘illegality’ of some and the legality of others, the illegality of certain movements and the legality of others (De Genova, 2013, p. 1190). Migration policies become borders when they are materialised, and they become effective and taken seriously in productions and consumptions when designed and circulated through visualisation. Undesigning then becomes important in order to resist the persuasiveness of spaces of borders and to produce counter-visuality to that of visualisations produced by borders and borderworks.

References Adey, P. 2004. Secured and sorted mobilities: Examples from the Airport. Surveillance & Society, 1 (4) pp. 500–519. Amoore, L. 2006. Biometric borders: Governing mobilities in the war on terror. Political Geography, 25 (3) pp. 336–51. Andreas, P. 2003. Redrawing the line: Borders and security in the twenty-first century. International Security, 28 (2) pp. 78–111. Balibar, É. 2002. Politics and the Other Scene. London:Verso. Balibar, É. 2009. Europe as Borderland. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27 (2) pp. 190–215. Bigo, D. 2002. Security and immigration: Toward a critique of the governmentality of unease. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 27 (1) pp. 63–92. Butler, J. 2009. Frames of War:When Is Life Grievable? London:Verso. Coleman, M. 2007. Immigration geopolitics beyond the Mexico – US border. Antipode, 39 (1) pp. 54–76. Debord, G. 1995 [1967] The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books De Genova, N. 2013. Spectacles of migrant ‘Illegality’: The scene of exclusion, the obscene of inclusion. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36 (7) pp. 1180–1198. Dürrschmidt, J. and Taylor, G. 2007. Globalisation, Modernity and Social Change: Hotspots of Transition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Franzén, M. 2001. Urban order and the preventive restructuring of space: The operation of border controls in micro space. The Sociological Review, 49 (2) pp. 202–218. Hydén, S. and Lundberg, A. 2004. Inre utlänningskontroll i polisarbete: mellan rättsstatsideal och effektivitet i Schengens Sverige. [Internal Border Check in Police Work: Between the Ideal of Rules of Law and Efficiency in Schengen’s Sweden]. PhD diss., Linköping University; Malmö University, http://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:20732/FULLTEXT01.pdf. [Accessed 20 January 2017]

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Jones, R. and Johnson, C. 2014. Placing the Border in Everyday Life. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Keshavarz, M. and Zetterlund, C. 2013. A method for materialising borders. In: Fahlén, E. ed. The Silent University Reader. Stockholm: Tensta Konsthall, pp. 27–30. Khosravi, S. 2010. The ‘Illegal’Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Khosravi, S. 2013. Is a world without borders Utopian? In: Fahlén, E. ed. The Silent University Reader. Stockholm: Tensta Konsthall, pp. 6–11. Mirzoeff, N. 2011. The right to look. Critical Inquiry, 37 (3) pp. 473–496. Mountz, A. 2011. Specters at the port of entry: Understanding state mobilities through an ontology of exclusion. Mobilities, 6 (3) pp. 317–334. Rancière, J. 2010. [2001]. Ten theses on politics. In: Rancière, J. ed. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Continuum, pp. 27–44. Rosière, S and Jones, R. Teichopolitics: Re-considering globalisation through the role of walls and fences. Geopolitics, 17 (1) pp. 217–234. Rumford, C. 2009. Citizens and Borderwork in Contemporary Europe. London: Routledge. Rumford, C. 2011. Seeing Like a Border. Political Geography, 30 (2) pp. 67–68. Salter, M. B. 2004. Passports, mobility, and security: How smart can the border be? International Studies Perspectives, 5 (1) pp. 71–91. Sheller, M. and Urry, J. 2000. The city and the car. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 24 (4) pp. 737–57. Stuesse, A. and Coleman, M. 2014. Automobility, immobility, altermobility: Surviving and resisting the intensification of immigrant policing. City & Society, 26 (1) pp. 51–72. Sturken, M. and Cartwright, L. 2001. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swedish Radio. 2013. Är ditt pass köpt i Botkyrka? [Is your passport bought in Botkyrka?], P3 Nyheter Sverige Radio. 1 March 2013. http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=1646&arti kel=5460272 [Accessed 22 February 2015]. Vallet, É. 2014. Borders, Fences and Walls: State of Insecurity? Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Van Schendel,W. 2005. Spaces of engagement: How Borderlands, illicit flows, and territorial states interlock. In: van Schendel, W. and Itty, A. eds. Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Walters, W. 2004. Secure borders, safe haven, domopolitics. Citizenship Studies, 8 (3) pp. 237–60. Walters, W. 2006. Border/control. European Journal of Social Theory, 9 (2) pp. 187–203.

14 NATURAL DISASTERS, UNDESIGN AND THE ABSENT INTERIOR Kirsty Volz

Introduction In 1972, the radical architectural group, Superstudio, proposed flooding the center of Florence by blocking the river Arno. The group drew vivid images of a flooded Florence where only “Brunelleschi’s radical dome would rise above the deluge.” (Glancey, 2013) These images were in response to Italy’s extensive heritage reforms such as the Venice Charter in 1964 and the formation of ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites). In an interview in 2011, Superstudio founding architect Adolfo Natalini stated that the speculative images of a flooded Florence “would be perfect for tourism.They could see the city by submarine instead of by bus!” (Ramo and Upmeyer, 2011) Superstudio’s imaginings of a flooded Florence proffer an opportunity to re-vision the city – to see the city in an utterly new way as a method of ‘unthinking’ what the city is, was and could be. More recently, in 2012, Australian architect Kevin O’Brien exhibited his work “Finding Country” at the Venice Biennale. In this project O’Brien invited people to “empty half of the city,” and designers, artists and practitioners to undesign cities. In particular, O’Brien proposes that the city is emptied by a burning, a symbolic fire that deconstructs sections of the city (Go-Sam, 2014, p. 67). Both of these examples propose a controlled form of natural disaster to undesign urban forms and settings. In the history of western cities, there are many examples of how natural disasters have resulted in the re-imagining of cities for the better, with the seventeenth-century fires in London most frequently cited as an example (Lynch, 1972, p. 8). This book chapter will look at how natural disaster undesigns the city, but importantly, the focus is on the inside of buildings and personal objects. In particular, this article focuses on the impact of flood, of real flood events, on the interior. This research came about as a reflection of my own, personal experience with natural disaster. In January 2011, a swollen Brisbane River broke its banks flooding riverside houses and buildings. The river’s water spread and rose up through storm water drains inundating some 20,000 houses in low-lying land. As the water receded those residents affected by the floods returned to their homes to assess the damage. While some people breathed a sigh of relief, others were devastated by the overwhelming damage to their homes and personal belongings.

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Over the next few weeks, the landscape of Brisbane was altered, not merely by the mud and debris left by the torrent of water, but by the piles of domestic contents occupying Brisbane streets: beds, toys, cabinets, plasterboard, tiles and household furniture lined curbsides waiting for collection. Later they would accumulate in public parks and sports centers to await disposal, momentarily creating an unsettling landscape of discarded domestic interiors. While most houses remained standing, the heart breaking repercussions were evident in their interiority.Thousands of volunteers flocked to help those affected by the floods to purge the damage left by the water – removing wall and floor linings, discarding furniture and spoilt belongings. In her paper on Hurricane Katrina, Julieanna Preston described this very same condition that affected Louisiana:“What anthropological evidence would we find as we followed their migration – heaps left by the side of the road, the physical weight overcoming the personal value, or small cloisters of artifacts reconstituting home on the floor of the Super Dome in Texas? What do the cherished belongings of over 160,000 abandoned homes look like?” (2010, p. 6) As climate change enters political and social consciousness, the events of natural disaster act as evidence of the anthropogenic impact. Much of the research on natural disaster and the built environment is focused on redeveloping, rebuilding and designing away natural disaster. The emphasis is on cleaning away the damage and developing measures to prevent these events from causing devastation in the future. However, what can be learned from natural disaster? In their work on the estuaries and waterways in Mumbai published in the book SOAK, urban theorists Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha propose that designers, architects and planners need to engage in a process of ‘unthinking’ in the development of cities that flood. They propose that planners and designers work with the indeterminacy of flood and not try to design it away. Working toward soft boundaries between ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ by creating adaptable structures that work with the rise and fall of water and not create hard boundaries that re-direct water – only to create more dangerous environments elsewhere. They argue that the urban landscapes designed to value dry land above water are more dangerous than the floodwaters themselves (2009, p. 12). In the spirit of Mathur and da Cuhna’s unthinking, this book chapter seeks to look closely at the damage floodwaters cause to the inside of buildings and asks what does this damage have to tell us about how we relate to our built environment? What can we learn about how we inhabit buildings in the aftermath of natural disaster? What does the undesign of natural disaster have to teach us about our built environments? The research is drawn from artists, photographers, theorists and museum curators who have all captured the interiors of buildings, and the associated objects of the interior, after they have been lost to flood.

Searching for traces: absent interiors This image (Figure 14.1) from floods in a rural area of Queensland in Australia in 1906, illustrates the damage created by flood to the interior perfectly. A chair, an object belonging to an interior, or to an enclosed space at the very least, has been shifted by force into the wilderness. A refugee from its habitat, it has been forcefully removed. Floodwaters have no concern for the designed systems we have in place. They move between the interior and exterior of buildings with complete disregard for the systems that were designed to prevent them from entering the interior of buildings. The architect and builder work so hard to create layers of barrier to prevent moisture and the elements from entering the building and yet the floodwaters move through a building, seemingly with ease. It also demonstrates that an interior is a condition of

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FIGURE 14.1 Chair

removed from the Blackall Hotel in the 1906 floods.

Image source: John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.

not only enclosure, but also one of organization and systems.The chair as an isolated object in the damaged landscape warns the viewer of a tragic event or impending danger. Jean Baudrillard describes the interior of modern buildings as merely a system for the organization of objects. Instead of places that would exhibit Heidegger’s concepts of ‘rootedness,’ or Bourdieu’s ‘habitus,’ the modern interior is simply a place for stuff (Easthope, 2004, p. 130). Baudrillard writes in his text The System of Objects, “Instead of consuming objects, [the subject] dominates, controls and orders them. [The subject] discovers [their self] in the manipulation and tactical equilibrium of a system.” (1996, p. 8) That is, the interior is not indifferent to a car engine, which functions through the interdependent operation of several objects.The way in which the entire contents of domestic interiors are discarded in the aftermath of flood support Baudrillard’s theory.The flood effectively destroys the system through which an interior is organized and the ability to recognize or pull out single items from flood-ravaged possessions is a seemingly impossible task. Without the system to organize the objects of the interior, the value of each object is lost, even when the object has the capacity to survive the flood. The concept of the ‘interior’ itself is relatively new. In Charles Rice’s book, The Emergence of the Interior, he positions the interior as a product of industrialization, modernity and the bourgeoisie. He argues, “the supposed stability offered by the interior is a reaction to the alienation and disjunctions of the modernizing city” (2007, p. 11). Rice’s work is underpinned by Walter Benjamin’s The Arcade’s Project (Benjamin, 1999), through which Rice arrives at a definition for the interior that is not about the concealment or enclosure of space, but through the subject’s engagement with the space and the arrangement of objects and artifacts: The interior is produced through an infolding, which Benjamin encourages one to consider literally in terms of the interior as soft and impressionable surface. This surface

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does not produce a hermetic seal against the external world, but rather is activated through the inhabitant’s relation to the city and its world of publicness, business and commerce, and enables a subjectivity and a social identity marked ‘bourgeois’ to be supported artifactually. (Rice, 2007, p. 6) This definition echoes Baudrillard’s concept for a system of objects within the interiors. Rice also discusses the “the fate of objects-become-commodities” (2007, p. 10) and how the shift from the handcrafted or the family heirloom to the mass produced commodity of domestic objects has renegotiated social relations within interior space. Social and cultural values have been imbibed, historically, via objects, artifacts and heirlooms, but this has now shifted to a culture that sees these physical possessions as merely disposable goods and this is made acutely evident by flood-ravaged interiors. The objects that remain from flood have the capacity to convey unique stories to their domestic interior and to future generations. These objects are altered, damaged and affected in a way that may never be repeated and, as such, contain a value to an “accumulated sense of being” (Noble, 2004, p. 240). As Andreas Huyssen writes, physical artifacts carry with them the capacity to “express the growing need for spatial and temporal anchoring in a world of increasing flux in ever denser networks of compressed time and space” (2000, p. 26). With the disposal of objects and artifacts by those affected by flood, it leaves the collection of memory through physical artifacts to the museum. Part of the Queensland Museum’s collection of flood damaged artifacts is this mud caked TEAC turntable (Figure 14.2). In an interview with the museum’s social history curator, the importance of retaining this object was described: The turntable, in its current condition, is significant for its ability to demonstrate the impact of the floods on everyday objects and personal possessions.With the majority of objects either cleaned or discarded following the flood, the turntable provides a tangible record of the effects on personal property that were experienced across Queensland. With a focus after the floods on cleaning up, it is important to collect objects which represent this story as it happened and the impact on everyday lives. . . .The retention of an object such as the turntable, complete with mud, provides an authentic tool for the future interpretation of the impact of the floods and ongoing role of natural disasters. Flood damaged objects are retained in the museum rather than returned to their original home. Subsequently, they belong to the interior of the museum. This need for exhibiting damaged artifacts illustrates Andreas Huyssen’s point that “today memory is understood as a mode of representation and as belonging to the present” (2000, p. 30). The turntable displayed out of context and by itself in the museum, and not amongst its traditional domestic setting, highlights Baudrillard’s assertion of the interior as a system (1996, p. 4). Once a flood has undesigned the system of the domestic interior, its objects become homeless, only to be adopted by the museum. It is displaced from its original interior. The example of the mud-caked turntable in the museum is a unique manifestation of what Charles Rice describes as the liberation of objects as commodities rather than their traditional domain of domesticity. That is, the event of the flood alters the status of the record player to such an extent that it no longer belongs in the domestic setting. The caked mud could be removed from the record player, it could be fixed, but the record player now represents the

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FIGURE 14.2  Mud-encrusted

electronic turntable from the Queensland Museum collections (Object No. H48145). Part of the Queensland Museum’s collection of flood damaged artifacts

(photo by author)

instability of life and the world within we live. The modern interior liberates the object and performs a being-in-the-world that allows for an illusion of stability. Rice writes that: Objects once circulated in their totality through the bond between maker and user (‘traditionally’ the same person) now circulated as abstract entities, stripped of all qualities that were once derived from an embeddedness in time and place, and a natural necessity of production and use. The experience of the shift in commodity production and circulation reflected the rise in significance of momentary experiences, consequent upon the modernity of industrialization and urbanization of the metropolitan world. (2007, p. 4) It is through the flooded, damaged or dilapidated interior that these theories can be physically manifest. The undesign of natural disaster, or war, proffers the architect and designer an opportunity physically deconstruct interior space and its meaning. With the rapid clean up after a flood, locating objects such as the TEAC record player is a rare occurrence. Photographers and artists play an important role in recording events in the aftermath of natural disaster. The next section of this chapter considers the work of Australia video and installation artist Chris Bennie and his reflections of a devastating flood that affected the regional town of Bundaberg. It also looks at the work of photographer Robert Polidori and his photographs of flood damaged interiors in Louisiana in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina. Polidori is capturing more than the decay of the inside of modern buildings, he is capturing traces of existence with the houses and buildings within the city. In an interview, Polidori stated, “you know more about a person from seeing how they live in their interiors than you do by looking at their faces” (Ground Magazine, 2012). His work is not just a

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portrayal of flood damage but also of how people relate to interior spaces. He makes the point that, “When I take photographs of empty rooms, they’re actually portraits of their inhabitants” (Ground Magazine, 2012). His works examine not just the damage caused by floodwater but they confront the viewer with questions about what an interior is. How do people relate to their own internal space?

The poignancy of absence Jeff Rosenheim suggests the Hurricane Katrina pictures “succeed because, in part, Polidori eschewed nostalgia for something far more complex – the poignancy of absence” (Polidori, Culbert, and Steidl, 2006, p. 9). Looking at his images the viewer wonders where its former inhabitants are. Their absence is palpable. There is also a sense of absence of the interior itself; not just objects, but a sense of the interior. Polidori ascribes this sense of absence to not just the condition of the interior, but also the pending demolition of these spaces. In a 2016 interview, he said: Wind damage is one thing, but with water damage, the only things left are metallic or ceramic. Everything else is lost. I think of each one of those interior photos as a funerary image. It’s paying your last respects. All those homes are going to be demolished or burned, and you’ll never have any other traces of any of it but through photographs. . . . Traces of human interventions, metaphorically speaking a fresh corpse. I am interested in the deterioration that occurs nearest to death, because over time one loses definition and the details of temporal reconstruction are wiped away. That’s why the aftermath of Katrina was such an amazing experience for me. (Polidori, 2016) If Polidori eludes to the interior as a body, then his forensic analysis of these spaces also proffers a study of their decay. Polidori’s work acts as an unintentional collection of empirical data of flood. As Julianna Preston described in her paper on Polidori’s photographs of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (Figure 14.3), these images tell us so much more than any other form of flood documentation (2010, p. 78). Polidori is known for his portrayals of architecture and urban environments after catastrophic events. Julieanna Preston described his Katrina images as, “a series of interiors undetected by satellite imaging or storm radar. More telling, more dramatic, more unnerving, more alarming, they force a disturbance of what is familiar” (2010, p. 90). An article in the New York Times titled, “What’s wrong with this picture?” supported Polidori’s photographic capturing of natural disaster: All artists, as best they can, make sense of a world that is often senseless. Mr. Polidori’s work, from Chernobyl to Havana – in sometimes dangerous, topsy-turvy, out-of-time places – generally bears witness to profound neglect. A photojournalist’s compulsion and problem is always to contrive beauty from misery, and it is only human to feel uneasy about admiring pictures like these from New Orleans, whose sumptuousness can be disorienting. But the works also express an archaeologist’s aspiration to document plainspoken truth, and they are without most of the tricks of the trade that photographers exploit to turn victims into objects and pictures of pain into tributes to themselves. (Kimmelman, 2006)

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FIGURE 14.3 6539 Canal Street by Robert Polidori. Polidori documents how floodwaters damage

interior lining of buildings.

Polidori’s photographs have been the cause of some controversy, however, and they have been widely criticized for their ‘aestheticizing’ of disaster (Kimmelman, 2006). From my perspective, they document the undesign of flood. Such a perspective provides an opportunity to examine the meaning of an interior and is most certainly necessary before proposing design solutions to the complex problem of flood. Polidori’s images communicate with much detail the damage suffered by the architecture. The way floodwaters move seemingly unmovable objects and rise and fall and then rise again; how they ebb and flow against the walls and not sit statically as in the hard lines used in architects’ drawings to represent floodwaters. These photographs are the representation of the abandoned data of flood. The images are not the aesthetisization of disaster; rather they act as authentic and meaningful records of the damage left by flood. They overlay another dimension of accuracy to the lines drawn on Cartesian planes to represent flood lines; capturing that unmeasurable point somewhere in the middle of where the water ebbs for a time, then flows, only to return to the same point to ebb again and this is where there is greatest amount of damage. My work has sometimes been accused of being too aestheticizing and of mystifying tragic events. I never modified anything I found; as I have just said I never sought to embellish the scene that I found in front of me. Everything that my pictures offer is born by coincidence. Obviously, nature is an absolutely astounding force of imagination and creativity. (Kimmelman, 2006)

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FIGURE 14.4  Kissing

Swans by Chris Bennie. Flood damaged caravan as sculpture and installation site for Bennie’s video work.

Another example of flood-damaged artifacts re-contextualized is in the work of Chris Bennie’s 2013 sculpture and video installation The Kissing Swans (Figure 14.4). The work consists of a water-damaged caravan salvaged from the floods in the Australian coastal town of Bundaberg in 2013. Within the caravan, Bennie projects a video of a couple performing everyday domestic tasks in a choreographed sequence of movements (Bennie, 2013). These acts correspond to some of the meaning that has been lost in the object’s state of disrepair, overlaying the acts that would symbolize the caravan’s functional use and as such, Baudrillard’s definition for a system of objects (1996, p. 5). Bennie writes about the potency of the discarded objects of natural disaster: Since then, repurposing things has taken on new meaning for me. I’m no longer interested in the ‘everydayness’ of found objects, but instead in their symbolic potential; their monumentality. Objects that have been through trauma have a value that cannot be replicated. There is an authenticity to a caravan that has been flooded. It has a gravitas. It represents disaster honestly, without embellishment or pretence. No artistic or manmade gesture can compete with the power of tragedy. (Bennie, 2015) In addition to Bennie’s observation, the undesign of flood gives us empirical data on our existence and survival against natural disaster. In the understandable haste to repair and discard the evidence of flood, much of this information is lost. Leaving the remaining evidence of flood for the museum and the artist and not as everyday reminders of what has occurred. Bennie writes that,

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Disasters represent not only the destructive power of nature, but also the fallibility of human understanding. We are unable to comprehend the scale of devastation just as we are powerless to stop it. Almost always, we try to do both. () In both Bennie and Polidori’s work, there is an awareness that they are working with the detritus of the damaged city. The objects that they have captured or are representing will be destroyed, thrown away or demolished. They are soon to be absent. In an essay on Polidori’s work, Rosenheim wrote, “One source of our lasting attraction to these merciless domestic landscapes is the certain knowledge that they will soon be gone forever” (Polidori, Culbert, and Steidl 2006, p. 9). Modern and postmodern built environments, assembled from composite materials, refuses to deteriorate in response to environmental and external conditions as a ruin, or to even leave traces of its existence, instead, as Andreas Huyssen writes, “modernist architecture refuses the return of culture to nature” (2010, p. 25).

In the absence of ruins For practical and sanitation reasons flood damaged interiors are rapidly eradicated. The process through which they are removed is almost ceremonious, involving countless volunteers from the community all working together to remove damaged interior linings and objects. The act of removing and cleaning these interiors is remarkable and as important an event as the flood itself. In the absence of the original interior, the work of artists such as Polidori and Bennie or the collections in the museum are vital reminders of important events. However, these images and artifacts out of their domestic context call into question authenticity. As Andreas Huyssen notes, “in the case of ruins, what is allegedly present and transparent whenever authenticity is claimed it is present only as an absence. It is the imagined present of a past that can now be grasped only in its decay. Any ruin posits the problem of a double exposure to the past and the present.” (2010, p. 21) In the case of the modern flooded interior, it is a complete absence of any ruin. There is no tolerance for decay. Huyssen is referring to the traditional ruin, which remains as partially decayed and absent, while simultaneously partially present and existing, as with the remnant of Brunelleschi’s radical dome in the speculative flooding of Florence depicted in Superstudio’s images. After the hypothetical flooding of Florence there is an absence of architecture, but there are still remains of architecture that remain as a ruin. In this search for the authentic representation of flood in art and design, what is there left to witness when modern architecture leaves nothing behind? Can there be a ruin in the complete absence of any artifact? Can the flood artifact in the museum, the photograph of the flood damaged interior, or the video installation in the flood-ravaged caravan be adequately considered as ruins? Are representations of flood damage in art and the museum the modern equivalent of the ruin? Huyssen responds to this question and his unequivocal response is that these representations do not equate to an authentic ruin in modernity: This argument finds support in modernist architecture, as the building materials of concrete, steel and glass do not erode or decay in the way that stone does. They refuse the return of culture to nature, which was still so central to Simmel. It would have never

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occurred to Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe to develop a ruin theory of architecture as Speer did, even though by the early twenty-first century much modernist architecture has reached its own ruinous stage. However, the catastrophes of the twentieth century have mainly left rubble behind rather than ruins in Piranesi’s sense, even if some of that rubble has lent itself quite well to beautifying representations.The age of the authentic ruin is over. We can write its genealogy, but we can’t resurrect it. We live in the age of preservation, restoration and authentic remakes, all of which cancel out the idea of the authentic ruin. (Huyssen, 2006, p. 20) The representation of flood damage by the artists’ work presented in this chapter along with the preservation of the record player by the museum are the rubble that Huyssen describes lending themselves to simply beautiful representations. The inauthentic or modern ruins that seek to leave no traces are difficult to accept as objects and media to absorb as data rich remnants of flood damage for designers to learn from. Without modern architecture leaving ruins for architects and designers to study and critique the, perhaps, inauthentic representations of ruins are too easily overlooked as valuable to a reading of the contemporary built environment. However, in a culture where “the new is made to look old rather than the old made to look young,” (Huyssen, 2006, p. 9) how can designers develop a framework through which to analyze these representations of ruin? Especially in a designed environment where “authenticity claims, however, are often contaminated by doubts that then have to be compensated by further myth making” (Huyssen, 2006, p. 18). Who is to say that Polidori did not stage these images in a studio or that Bennie intentionally created scuffs on the caravan to make it appear as though it was flood damaged, or that the mud caked record player was not the result of some other mishap in its life? With the disposal and ensuing absence of the original flood damaged interiors that create these spaces and objects, there is no way of authenticating these images and objects.

Conclusion In comparison to the simulated proposals to empty cities by flooding, such as those made by Superstudio, the representations of flooded interiors represented in this chapter serve to offer an opportunity for a post mortem of the built environment.While Superstudio are concerned with re-imagining the future city through natural disaster, Polidori and Bennie are attempting to examine events of the past. Their works do more than tell us about the damage that water can do to the interior of a space. They portray a snapshot of a former existence of a space. They are showing us a glimpse of what is absent in the space. Their works are about inhabitations and the relationships with and between subjectivity and the arrangement of objects within interior space. In looking back at the undesign of interior space, the viewer is presented with a method of deconstructing what the interior is. What does an interior mean to the daily habits that are performed within it, when they cease to exist? Viewing the absent interior enables a profound questioning of what an interior is.

References Benjamin, W., 1999. The Arcades project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Bennie, C., 2013. The Kissing Swans (Art Installation). Bundaberg, Queensland Australia.

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Bennie, C., 2015. The repurpose of tragedy. In: The waves + control room [online]. Exhibition catalogue. Available from: www.photoaccess.org.au/files/Chris%20Bennie_catalogue_web.pdf. Baudrillard, J., 1996. The system of objects, trans. J. Benedict. London and New York:Verso. Easthope, H., 2004. A place called home. Housing,Theory and Society, 21 (3), 128–138. Glancey, J., 2003. Anti-matter. The Guardian, 31 Mar [online]. Available from: www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2003/mar/31/architecture.artsfeatures. Go-Sam, C., 2014. Sep Yama: ‘Ground you cannot see’ Finding Country (a primer). [exhibition review] Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts, 11, 154–159 [online]. Available from: http:// interstices.aut.ac.nz/ijara/index.php/ijara/article/viewFile/32/90. Huyssen, A., 2000. Present pasts: Media, politics, amnesia. Public Culture, 12 (1), 21–38. Huyssen, A., 2006. Nostalgia for ruins. Grey Room, 23, 6–21. Huyssen, A., 2010. Authentic ruins. In: J. Hell, ed. Ruins of modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 17–28. An interview with Robert Polidori. 2012. The Ground Magazine, 2 Nov [online]. Available from: www. thegroundmag.com/an-interview-with-robert-polidori/. Kimmelman, M., 2006. What’s wrong with this picture? New York Times [online], 22 Sep. Available from: www.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/arts/design/22floo.html?_r=0. Lynch, K., 1972. What time is this place? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mathur, A. and da Cunha, D., 2009. SOAK: Mumbai in an Estuary. Mumbai: Rupa & Company. Noble, G., 2004. Accumulating being. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7 (2), 233–256. O’Brien, K., 2007. Sanctuary Place: Sep Yama/Finding Country 5 Ways. Architectural Review Australia, 103. Polidori, R., Culbert, E., and Steidl, G., 2006. After the flood. Berlin: Stiedl. Polidori, R. and Zamponi, B., 2016. Robert Polidori: Interview. Domus, 18 Nov [online]. Available from: www.domusweb.it/en/interviews/2016/11/18/robert_polidori.html. Preston, J., 2010. Into after. In: Proceedings of the Interior Spaces in Other Places Symposium, 3–5 February, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, 178–186 [online]. Available from: http://idea-edu. com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/2010-Symposium-Papers-Interior-Spaces-in-Other-Places. pdf. Ramo, B. and Upmeyer, B., 2011. Deadly serious: interview with Adolfo Natalini – Founder of Natalini Architetti and Superstudio. MONU, 14, Apr [online]. Available from: http://st-ar.nl/ deadly-serious-%e2%80%93-interview-with-adolfo-natalini/. Rice, C., 2007. The emergence of the interior: Architecture, modernity, domesticity. London: Routledge.

15 “IMAGINATION WOVE THIS FLESH GARMENT” Fashion, critique and capitalism Kathleen Horton and Alice Payne

Introduction With its intimate connection to the logic of capitalism, fashion has the ability to absorb critique, making fashionable what was once subversive. Fashion commentators from Baudelaire and Simmel in the modern era to Baudrillard (1993, 98) in more contemporary times have noted that, “fashion . . . makes the refusal of fashion into a fashion feature.” As Mark Wigley (1995, xxiii) notes, “it is not just that every fashion has its critics or, or even that fashion itself has its critics. More fundamentally, a crucial part of fashion is the turning of anti-fashion statements into fashion.”While this contradictory logic to fashion is often perceived in ontological terms, it also can be understood as part of the political economy of fashion, which in turn is connected to fashion’s cosy connection to capitalism. As Anne Hollander (1993, 165) suggests, “the impulse within fashion to make capital of what is new and disturbing converts it quickly into fashion.” What therefore can we make of twenty-first-century fashion design practices that seek to critique fashion? Are these examples of Un-Design, or business as usual? Given the highly commodified context of contemporary fashion, such practices would seem to be speculative at best, operating on the margins of a system that will simply feed on their critical content and reinvent them as the next trend. This chapter examines a lineage of critique through examples of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first-century practitioners whose work, although diverse, turns on a critical relationship to the fashion system and the world that it designs. Their practices engage a range of concerns in relation to fashion including consumerism, social justice and un-sustainability and their practices operate across a number of contexts spanning art, industry and education. To explore how these practitioners may or may not ‘un-design’ fashion, we begin with a discussion of fashion’s particular relationship with capitalism, and the mechanisms through which critique is absorbed back into new fashion styles, images and industry practices. Next, we apply this framework in case studies of practitioners. We trace the ambiguities of the critical fashion designer: she may be an important voice of dissent from the margins whose critique can propel the industry toward new and perhaps better futures.Yet at the same time, the critical fashion designer’s work may be recuperated by a mutable industry hungry for newness and resistant to critique.

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Fashion, capitalism and critique The histories of fashion and capitalism are intertwined. Fashion, defined as a system of dress that turns on rapidly changing styles, emerged in the context of the “mercantile capitalism” of medieval Europe (Wilson 2003, 16). Thus the rise of fashion in the West is coincidental with the birth of capitalism. However, the relationship between fashion and capitalism is not simply one of historical coincidence. Sombart (1902, in Briggs 2013, 187) and Lipovetsky (1994, 152) describe fashion as “capitalism’s favorite child” and the “daughter of capitalism” respectively and Wilson (2003, 14) adds, “fashion speaks capitalism.” This series of poetic metaphors regarding fashion and capitalism point to a curiously gendered understanding, whereby fashion is seen not only to enjoy a familial connection to capitalism, but also to act as a highly visible metonym for capitalism. Certainly both fashion and capitalism share the logic of continual change and novelty (Lipovetsky 1994). As Barthes (1990 [1967], 298) explains, the frenetic rate of stylistic obsolescence in fashion determines that the “rhythm of purchase exceeds the rhythm of dilapidation,” thus driving patterns of consumption well beyond questions of need. However, the consumption of fashion is not only tied to a highly turbulent turnover of styles; fashion consumption also symbolizes the values of freedom of choice, individualism and the “social promotion of signs of personal difference” (Lipovetsky 1994, 46). In the context of a consumer culture in which ‘desire’ is ‘constantly stimulated’ fashion is therefore intimately connected to the workings of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, 427). While “the desire to be in fashion” drives consumption (Entwistle 2015, xiv) the production of fashion is also closely aligned with the less glamorous workings of capitalist economics. Wilson (2003, 13) argues that as “capitalism has become global, imperialist and racist” the production of fashion is implicated in an economic system that routinely exploits workers in developing countries in the name of corporate profit. This dimension to fashion has never been more accentuated than it is now. While the economic benefits of a rapid turnover in styles were recognized at least as early as the seventeenth century (Briggs 2013, 188), the early part of the twenty-first century has seen the rise of fast fashion, a system that is characterized by the proliferation of “mutual plagiarism” of designs (Briggs 2013, 186), “just-in-time manufacturing” and “high speed, high volume consumption” (Fletcher 2008, 161). As Fletcher (2008, 162) points out, the ‘fast’ in fast fashion refers mainly to ‘economic speed,’ a production element that along with “labour, capital and natural resources” is “squeezed in the pursuit of maximizing throughput of goods for increased profits.” Fast-fashion results in what is known as a ‘race-to-the-bottom’ business model, which sees high volumes of increasingly cheaper clothing produced in developing countries for an ever burgeoning first world market. In the context of a highly globalized economy ‘fast fashion’ is indeed the poster child of a paradoxical version of post-industrial capitalism that relies on modes of industrial production that have “scarcely changed since the invention of the sewing machine one hundred and seventy years ago” (Sullivan 2016, 34). In seeking to articulate their own critical position in The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005, 36) Boltanski and Chiapello write that “anti-capitalism is in fact as old as capitalism.” Boltanski and Chiapello (2005, 36–37) go on to suggest that the critique of capitalism (which emerges initially in the emotional form of indignation) can be identified through four main themes which have held persistent ground since the nineteenth century: namely capitalism as a source of disenchantment and inauthenticity; capitalism as a source of oppression; capitalism as a source of poverty and inequalities; and capitalism as a source of opportunism and egoism.

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According to Boltanski and Chiapello (2005, 38), two forms of critique emerge from these indignations: an artistic critique and a social critique. Typified by the figure of the dandy, (specifically Baudelaire), the artistic critique of capitalism pitches individuality, freedom and detachment against the rationalist productivity of the bourgeoisie which defines itself through its obsessive ownership of “land, factories and women” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, 38). The second critique which is “inspired by socialists and, later, by Marxists” (2005, 38) “seeks above all to solve the problem of inequalities and poverty” (2005, 39). However, as Boltanski and Chiapello explain, these two forms of critique often find themselves in opposition, and indeed often “enter into a tension with one another” (2005, 38). Moreover, Boltanski and Chiapello also point to the ‘ambiguity,’ ‘incompleteness’ and ‘fallibility’ of critique insofar as “even the most radical movements” share ‘something’ with what they seek to criticize. This condition places “capitalism and its critiques” into an interminable dialectic “as long as we remain in the capitalist regime” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, 40). However, they also argue that capitalism needs criticism to counter its ‘amorality’ (2005, 163). In fact the authors link the fact that “the capitalist system has turned out to be infinitely more robust than its detractors” to the fact that capitalism has “discovered a road to salvation in the criticisms it has faced.” Put simply, capitalism adopts or co-opts critique in order to drive the next stage of its evolution. Similarly, Hardt and Negri (2000) note capitalism as undergoing cycles of crisis and transformation, in which, for example, the protest movements of 1968 prompted capitalism to evolve. This mutability is a key characteristic of capitalism, but “it undergoes systemic transformation only when it is forced to and when its current regime is no longer tenable” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 268). We turn now to apply this theorization of capitalism and its critiques to that of fashion and its critiques. We argue that fashion, like capitalism, thrives on critique from the margins in order to evolve. In the following sections, we examine forms that the critique of fashion has taken over the past 150 years, beginning in the nineteenth century with William Morris and aesthetic dress, and continuing in the twentieth century with the work of Lucy Orta, to contemporary fashion practitioners Otto Von Busch and Suzanne Lee. Through these diverse examples, our aim is to explore the various forms that critiques of fashion take, and to examine the processes through which these critiques are absorbed into mainstream fashion. As in the case of its parent system, capitalism, while the purpose of critique may be to un-design fashion, critique might also act as point of creative departure for practitioners. Moreover, as we suggest, the ideas generated through critical distance can be seen to be both co-opted by a fashion system eager for novelty as well as drive its development toward potentially better futures.

A lineage of critical fashion: nineteenth and twentieth centuries William Morris and aesthetic dress Our first example of fashion’s critique comes from a movement that fits well with Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2005) notions of the artistic and social critique, and traces the birth of artistic dress, or aesthetic dress as it was later called. Artistic dress began with the Pre-Raphaelites in 1830s London. The Pre-Raphaelite group of artists was inspired by the work of John Ruskin and by Medieval and early Renaissance art. Representations of clothing in their art were developed from tomb effigies, medieval paintings and their imagining of the past (Cullen 2010). The women of the Pre-Raphaelite artistic circle, such as Elizabeth Siddall,

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Christina Rossetti and later Jane Morris, adopted these styles of clothing, which were in stark contrast to the fashions of the time. With loose un-corseted gowns and flowing sleeves and trains, artistic dress bore scant resemblance to the dominant Victorian styles of heavy corseting and artificial silhouettes formed from crinolines or bustles. Artistic dress initially marked the wearer out as worse than unconventional: women who modeled for and associated with artists were already considered part of the demi-monde (Moyle 2009), and loose un-corseted dress implied a similar looseness of morals. Artist, craftsman and writer William Morris, who came later to the Pre-Raphaelite movement, was similarly inspired by this romantic medievalism, which was in essence, “a revolt against the Railway Age . . . it posed the existence, in the past, of a form of society whose values were finer and richer than those of profit and capitalist utility” (Thompson 2011 [1955], 9). Morris was a strong advocate of aesthetic dress, and his wife Jane Morris became its most famous wearer, attending social gatherings where “Janey ‘in her ripest beauty, and dressed in a long unfashionable gown of ivory velvet, occupied the painting-throne’ ” (quoted in Thompson 2011 [1955], 160).Yet to Morris and his circle, aesthetic dress represented more than a bohemian flouting of convention. Morris, like his contemporaries Ruskin and Carlyle, was ideologically opposed to the growing materialism of the time. His life’s work became a struggle against the cold industrialization of Victorian England; Morris stated this baldly, “apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization” (quoted in Linebaugh 2011, viii). In the figure of Morris, we see both the artistic and social critique of capitalism come together: in his struggle against the social ills of industrial society and in his quest for authenticity. In his 1887 novel News from Nowhere, Morris described his vision for an alternative, classless society, ‘Nowhere,’ founded on socialist principles. The clothing worn by the inhabitants of Nowhere was the loose-fitting garb of artistic dress, but was also a metaphor for Nowhere’s uninhibited, classless society (Campbell 2007). In the book, Morris expressed his abhorrence for conventional Victorian women’s dress in which women appeared ‘upholstered like armchairs’ (Morris 1993 [1890], in Campbell 2007, 53). Morris was a supporter of women’s rights and a committed Marxist (Waggoner 2003), so his alternate clothing styles were more than a protest to the dominant artificiality of fashion styles of Victorian England: they were political. For Morris, clothing for both men and women should be unencumbered, free and expressive, and made by the honest work of a craftsperson. Influenced by the work of Ruskin and Carlyle, especially Carlyle’s teaching “of the dignity of all labour” (Thompson 2011 [1955], 32), for Morris aesthetic dress was a metaphor for the kind of society he wanted: one free of class distinctions and where men and women had dignity in their work. Fashion history determines, however, that Victorian fashion effectively absorbed the stylistics of aesthetic dress with little regard for its political or social messages regarding either class or production. In the late nineteenth century, high fashion dressmakers and designers such as Worth et Cie., and Grace et Cie., popularized the ‘tea gown,’ a loose-fitting gown initially worn only in the home.The dress department of Liberty Company, opened by Arthur Lasenby Liberty in 1884, was also key in the popularization of aesthetic dress (Mutnick 2010). Upper class society women adopted the tea gown, and the faded colors of natural dyes (that had symbolized a craft-based process of making for Morris) briefly became fashionable before the more stylized forms and vivid colors of art nouveau styles came into vogue at the turn of the twentieth century (Cullen 2010). Although fashion appropriated these styles in a typically ‘inspirational’ manner, it is significant to note that The Dress Reform movement also championed

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aesthetic dress for its health benefits and “by the 1890s many features of aesthetic dress had been gradually incorporated into the fashionable dress of the day” (Wilson 2003, 216). The absorption of aesthetic dress into mainstream fashion highlights some of the complexities when considering critical design practice and fashion. First, following the logic of fashion, aesthetic dress emerged as the result of a critique of both the prevalent fashionable aesthetic, the industrial modes of its production and the ‘mercantile nature’ (Stern 2004, 6) of fashion. Second, also following the logic of fashion, the industry managed to absorb this aesthetic and reproduce it in facsimile form yet another fashionable silhouette, as a vaguely avant-garde style ostensibly bereft of its political message. However, this summation is not quite the whole the story.While there is no doubt that the larger political message of the dress was lost once this style of dressing became fashionable, aesthetic dress was still profoundly influential. In shifting Victorian notions of what types of garments could be both acceptable and beautiful, it heralded a sense of physical and psychological freedom that became one of the hallmarks of modern dress for women. Moreover, the significance of aesthetic dress in the late nineteenth century was not solely equated with physical freedom, nor was it some form of Victorian dress-up. Following Stella Mary Newton (1975 quoted in Wilson 2003, 218) the adoption of aesthetic dress marks a significant shift toward modern forms of fashionable identity. To a certain extent, the society ladies who adopted aesthetic dress did so because this form of dress communicated a modern, social liberal identity. Thus, although aesthetic dress was born from a critique of fashionable dress and the society it represented, and although it became absorbed by the culture that it originally opposed, it nevertheless played a significant role in shifting fashion.

Lucy Orta: inside/outside fashion Turning now to a contemporary practitioner, Lucy Orta is key figure in the context of critical fashion design practices and a brief overview of her practice reveals some key tensions in the relationship between critique and fashion. Although Orta trained and worked as fashion/ textile designer, since the early 1990s, working collaboratively with her partner, Jorge Orta, she has achieved international critical acclaim in the field of socially engaged art practice. While her work therefore primarily circulates in the cultural field of contemporary art, Orta’s practice can be seen to emerge both from an indignation toward late twentieth-century fashion, and a desire to agitate the ‘definition of fashion’ (Orta 2010, 33). To this end it is important to note that Orta sees her early work as consistent with a broader cultural turn in the 1990s away from ‘elite Parisian couture’ exemplified by avant-garde fashion labels such as Maison Martin Margiela and Viktor and Rolf (2011, 34). This is significant because it means that, while she is positioned outside of the industrial and commercial production of fashion, Orta nonetheless acknowledges the ways in which certain practices in the industry may in fact offer a critique from within. Applying her expertise in fashion and textiles, Orta’s practice in the early 1990s looked to what it means to make clothing that addresses questions of shelter, survival and protection, developing work such as Habitent, (a domed tent that converts in to a cape), Ambulatory Survival Sac and Mobile Cocoon (Orta 2010, 33–34). Orta showed her work, Refuge Wear  (1992– 96) in a series of ‘interventions’ (Orta in Pinto, Bourriaud and Damianovic 2003, 9) at both fashionable and unfashionable sites of Paris during Paris Fashion Week in 1994 (Orta 2010, 34) partly as a way of drawing attention to questions of place and context. Therefore, while

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Orta’s criticism of the ‘blatant consumerism’ (Pinto, Bourriaud and Damianovic 2003, 136) of fashion aligns well with Morris’s nineteenth-century objections to the ills of capitalism, and acts as form of ‘social critique,’ her interventions seem to draw attention to the “ruins of the modern spectacle” (Debord 2003 [1957], 695).This aligns her work with the critical stance of the Situationists of the mid-twentieth century, and could therefore be understood as a form of détournement – “a strategy of diverting elements of affirmative bourgeois culture to revolutionary ends” (McDonough 2002, xiv). However, in the context of a twenty-first-century culture of ‘complicity’ (Drucker 2005), in which fashion and art openly benefit from corporate partnerships, such classic oppositions are arguably far more problematic. In the 1990s, the textile fair – Première Vision – showcased an exhibition of Orta’s work (Pinto, Bourriaud and Damianovic 2003), another work, Connector was shown in 2000 at the Pitti Uomo trade fair in Florence (Tommasini 2000, 74) and in 2012 Italian menswear label Ermenegildo Zegna’s art foundation commissioned a major work Fabulae Romanae (Oakley Smith and Kubler 2013) that utilized the company’s own hi-tech fabrics “to represent a symbolic function of protection” (Orta in De Leonardis 2012). Moreover, in an interview with Andrew Bolton in 2002, Orta clarified that while she had been very disillusioned with fashion in the 1990s, she now enjoyed “working in the fashion system” (Orta in Bolton 2002, 133). Despite (or alternately in light of) these close connections to the fashion system, Orta embraces the notion of critical distance through insisting on the ways in which her work (which both plays on a utilitarian aesthetic and is socially engaged) is ‘surprising’ and ‘dreamlike’ (Orta in Pinto, Bourriaud and Damianovic 2003, 9). In another nod to aesthetic autonomy, Orta has resisted any pragmatic application of her work that would see it mass-produced. In an interview with Paul Virilio in 1995, Orta reflected that she herself was preoccupied by the question of whether or not she should “commercialise the Habitent” (1992–93) given that there were “situations in which it could come in useful” (Pinto, Bourriaud and Damianovic 2003, 119). However, when approached by two manufacturers to produce a fully functioning aid package from Refuge Wear, she declined, claiming that “the final industrial prototype bore a physical resemblance to the original, but no longer manifested its poetical side” at which point she took the decision to work only on ‘initiatives’ and ‘pilot projects’ (Orta in Bolton 2002, 134). It is also important to note that Orta definitely sees her work as playing a leading role in the industry, although with some misgivings. For example, while she claims that her exhibition at Première Vision in 1996 was “instrumental in inspiring the ‘high-tech’ fabrics and ‘transformable’ clothing that emerged in the following seasons” (Orta in Bolton 2002, 134), she also notes however that she is surprised that companies that have obviously drawn on her work do not approach her for ‘collaboration.’ Orta also suggests that the fashion industry “practice of not crediting sources of inspiration . . . merits debate” (Orta in Bolton 2002, 134). A trend-forecasting feature in US Vogue best exemplifies a more insidious diffusion of Orta’s work. Entitled ‘Maximum Security’ (1998) with the subheading ‘designers are giving fashion a crash course in the protective principles of self-defence,’ the author draws tenuous links between the film Safe, Orta’s work and collections by high end fashion labels, Hussein Chalayan, Chanel, Jil Sander and Alexander McQueen to create a narrative in which the pressures of modern urban life are inspiring designs that protect and cocoon the wearer. The journalist asks: Why the sudden urge to protect? With her unique mixed-media clothing sculptures, Parisian-based artist Lucy Orta may have the answer. Orta fabricates high-performance

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outdoor ‘body architecture’ in response to the pressures of late modern urban society. Others are responding to similar pressures. . . . Jil Sanders’ approach was to add cocoonlike padding to skirts, sweaters, and dresses in her Fall collection. (Cooper 1998, 254) The author ends with the line, “So until the current style cyclone blows over, take cover in Prada’s nylon safety hood from the new sport line” (Cooper 1998, 254). In the discourse of fashion and lifestyle, Orta’s original political message about homelessness, disenfranchisement and the superficiality of fashion is lost. Instead, her work is strung together with the work of mainstream fashion practitioners into a stylistic narrative. The online trend forecasting service Worth Global Style Network (WGSN) has used Orta’s work in a similar vein to declare a general mood or malaise in society regarding security concerns citing her work in both 2004 and 2006.Yet the impact of Orta’s work can be felt in a tangible sense too: Detroit-based nonprofit organization The Empowerment Plan produces sleeping bag coats for the homeless, a parallel to Orta’s original Refuge Wear noted by fashion journalist Jasmine Chua (2013), some twenty years later. Therefore, as seen in the nineteenth-century example of aesthetic dress, and the late twentieth-century example of Orta, resistance to fashion can involve both artistic and social critiques. However, in both examples, fashion’s critique from the margins is often co-opted. To use the language of the Situationists, Orta’s acts of détournement have been recuperated by the dominant system.Yet, as a practitioner she has proved influential in bridging the space between art and design, and in proposing an extended role for the socially engaged designer as critic.We turn now to discuss two critical positions in twenty-first-century fashion practice: hacktivism and bio-textiles.

Twenty-first-century critical fashion Hacktivism and resistance: Otto von Busch Embracing an often light-hearted and lo-fi perspective, Swedish fashion designer and academic Otto Von Busch explores the idea of fashion interventions through his adoption of hacktivism, encouraging a rejuvenated consumer engagement with the fashion object through processes such as mending and upcycling. Like Morris, Von Busch advocates for a more profound relationship between fashion and the consumer than the current fashion system prescribes. Von Busch’s self-conscious anti-fashion industry stance has made him a popular workshop leader and writer, promoting ‘hacking’ mass-produced fashion garments to empower consumers. Some of his actions have the flavor of a Situationist détournement, for example inserting his fashion manifesto zines between the pages of real fashion magazines at newsagents (Twigger Holroyd 2015).Von Busch takes a conscious position of indignation: he speaks against a ‘fashion supremacy,’ and frames his clothing repair workshops as sites of resistance to fashion’s hegemony. Drawing from the alternative practices and discourse of computer hacktivism, von Busch has explored what a process of fashion hacktivism might be. Using a digital open-source platform, von Busch has developed a series of manuals he terms ‘cookbooks’ that teach users how to deconstruct and rework ubiquitous mass-produced garments. Like Morris (albeit from another time and very different world), von Busch advocates for the user-maker and the

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hand-made as a tool of political empowerment for the individual. However, unlike Morris, his work is infused with an often-humorous orientation that aligns his practice more closely with the Situationists and détournement. His digital publications are framed as manifestos, illustrated with sewing machine skull and crossbones, and slogans such as “home sewing is killing fashion,” or “the current fashion system is a totalitarian state” (von Busch 2012). Moreover, the whole adoption of hacktivism as a strategy secures him a future focussed place in the digital discourse of the twenty-first century. At the same time, it is a form of alternative practice that draws on the concept of ‘do it yourself ’ (DIY) extensively as its raison d’etre. In this sense, von Busch is drawing on a punk mentality to fashioning the self – one that took a distinctly lo-fi and domestic approach to the intervention in fashion practice. This in itself is a significant form of critical practice because it acknowledges pre-existing consumer goods – the very stuff of fashion – as the starting point for creativity and design. Unlike Orta, von Busch’s work has not yet been featured in mainstream fashion publications or trend forecasts. However, there is evidence that the discourse of hacking and DIY – ‘design it yourself ’ – is proving a source of inspiration for the industry at large.Trend forecasting magazine, Viewpoint (2010) identifies trends such as DIY in which users ‘hack’ and rework existing designs. More recently, WGSN trend reports have featured the hand-crafted, self-assembled style common to von Busch’s hacking, directing the client as follows: “craft and decorative arts inspire an indie artisan direction . . . while eclectic mismatched collage designs give a thrift store appeal. Be expressive in your approach, creating a humble yet artful mood” (WGSN Print and Graphics Team 2014). Hacking has become cool. In the same way that Orta’s utilitarian aesthetic and political message were co-opted by the industry as design inspiration and style story, the fashion industry of the twenty-first century has no trouble in mass-producing and selling a decorative DIY aesthetic that requires no input from consumers to enact. While von Busch promotes anti-capitalist political action, to be enacted on an individual level, parts of the fashion industry are also adopting mending. For example, outdoors brand Patagonia (2016), offers repair of its garments via a mobile repair van as part of their sustainable brand identity. Premium denim label Nudie jeans also alter their product for the wearer, and provide repair services as part of their boutique retail experience (Borromeo 2014). On the one hand, these repair practices can be viewed as the adoption of sustainable principles designed to promote longevity and responsible use. On the other hand, they can be viewed as the commodification of the once everyday domestic practice of mending. It is perhaps indicative of the broader context of twenty-first-century fashion and its ills that a practice as pedestrian as mending may simultaneously symbolize both a politics of resistance and a trendy service for consumers.

Bio-textile futures: Suzanne Lee For our last example, we turn to the notion of speculative futures for fashion through examining an experimental practitioner exploring the possibilities of bio-textiles. Fashion designer Suzanne Lee operates at the margins of fashion. Motivated by the inherent wastefulness of the fashion industry, Lee works in a field that crosses speculative future orientated design practice with scientific developments in textile production. As part of her Biocouture consultancy from 2003 to present, she has developed a technique for growing textiles, using yeast, bacteria and kombucha tea to create cellulosic textiles that can be harvested from vats. These are constructed into garments and accessories. Her cellulosic textiles are cut and sewn similarly

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to conventional garments, with classic wardrobe staples such as denim jackets reimagined using her skin-like textile. The motivation for her practice stems from a concern regarding the environmentally damaging processes of much of conventional textile production. Her garments, although not waterproof or indeed conventionally wearable, are fully biodegradable and contain no harmful chemicals in their production. The solution used to grow the textiles can be reclaimed and reused, effectively forming a closed-loop. In her TED talk, Lee describes an imagined future in which a whole garment could be ‘grown’ in a vat. Her website describes her work as “in the now, near and far future”(Lee 2014). Although the textile has been achieved, the growing of a whole garment remains speculative, as seen in Lee’s recent work – a mock-up of ‘grown’ shoes. The Biocouture shoe speculates on an alternate future where, instead of relying on materials derived from unsustainable petrochemical industries or from land needed for food, we move to a bio-tech model (Biocouture 2014). Lee says of fashion’s future: “I want it to be organic and natural and compostable” (Lee in Dworsky and Kohler 2014). Beyond the comparatively lo-fi approach of kombucha green tea, Lee sees the potential for genetic modification of the bacteria to design the qualities of the textile: The future will be about designing the bacteria to spin the thread to give it the qualities that we want. So if we want it to repel water, we design that into the cell. If we want it to deliver some kind of nutritious quality to your skin, perhaps, that could all be designed into the material. (Lee in Dworsky and Kohler 2014) She notes the challenge of developing experimental textiles for fashion: Fashion is just concerned with what’s happening in the next five minutes . . . in the last twenty years the time frames for thinking and making stuff happen in fashion have become shorter and shorter. There is no time for R&D in fashion. (Lee in Dworsky and Kohler 2014) Since 2008, in the context of ongoing concerns regarding fashion’s environmental impact, photographs of Lee’s one-off pieces have been widely reproduced in fashion books (San Martin 2010; Kennedy, Banis Stoehrer and Calderin 2013), magazines, websites, academic journal articles (Seymour and Beloff 2008; Hemmings and Simonson 2008) and trend forecasts. WGSN has featured her work in fashion and product design forecasts in 2008, 2011, and 2013. The forecasts all focus on the same project: the biocouture garments. At times the forecasts reference the skin-like materials as texture to inspire designers (Lefteri 2013), or link it to other textile innovations (Lefteri 2011), while at other times Lee’s work is linked to generalized environmental concerns or bio-tech futures (Wagner 2008). With the same project repeated again and again as a future idea that is never quite here, Lee’s designs remain as speculations that drive the circular nature of twenty-first-century fashion discourse. The visual style and surface of Lee’s work, with its translucent skin-like quality, is hard for the fashion industry to co-opt into actual garment styles. Instead, Lee works alongside the fashion industry as a kind of critical voice, prompting thought and liaising with industry through her consultancy. Yet although Lee’s Biocouture work is unlikely to be materially realized in mainstream fashion in the near future, her concept of fashion textiles from nontraditional biological sources has taken hold in a variety of ways. The application of science

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into textiles is ongoing, for example through the development of bio-engineered textiles in activewear featured in WGSN’s (2015) ‘Bespoke Bacteria’ report. Similarly, Carole Collett (2015), a researcher in textile futures, studies the potential of bacterial silk and greater development of biodegradable plastics to reduce reliance on petrochemically based fibres. Therefore, although Lee’s work operates at the level of a poetic critique, recent textile innovations have applied bio-engineered textiles, thus translating her propositions into an industry reality.

Conclusion It could be argued that anti-fashion statements are potentially nothing more than a trend mechanism of the broader fashion system, ultimately serving to drive further consumption. However, as we have discussed, the argument that all critical positions are necessarily neutralized or made benign through the commoditizing effects of fashion is worthy of scrutiny. As Mark Wigley (1995, 153) argues, “the phenomenon of fashion is unthinkable outside of resistance to it.”The critique of fashion is not so much the opposite of fashion, but part of fashion’s complex logic. In this chapter, we have traced a lineage of critical fashion through historical and contemporary examples. Through their practices, Orta, Lee and Von Busch negotiate the terms of critical engagement with twenty-first-century fashion. Like the alternative dress of earlier art movements, their position is not merely to challenge the mainstream or dominant fashion aesthetics, but to propose and speculate on how the ills of the fashion system may be unwound. Contemporary fashion media, seeking newness and fodder for fresh design directions, may adopt the mood and aesthetic suggested by these designers, but cannot mainstream their speculations or underlying critique. Like Morris and Orta, these designers attempt to un-design fashion through presenting novel ways to think about what we wear, how it is made and why it is made. Through their work, they question the norms of conventional fashion design practice and propose radical, if speculative, solutions to fashion’s crisis of unsustainable production and consumption. These critiques cannot un-design fashion itself – it is too huge a beast, too ravenous for new styles and too impervious to substance or criticality. However, they are important voices of dissent, coming from a place at once inside and outside of the fashion industry.

Notes/Acknowledgements 1 The title of this chapter is drawn from Victorian philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s (1831) abstruse novel Sartor Resartus, in which Carlyle uses clothing as a metaphor to critique the materialism of the age and loss of a spiritual dimension to life. As such, Sartor Resartus both is and is not about clothing. Michael Carter (2003) writes that Sartor Resartus is “a manifesto for authenticity, a plea for the outer ‘vestural tissue’ to become the true embodiment of spiritual and social renewal.” We have stolen Carlyle’s poetic phrasing for our title because, for us, it captures the notion of a speculative clothing in which imagination may weave alternate futures for fashion. 2 The authors gratefully acknowledge our colleague Dr. Tiziana Ferrero-Regis’ insightful feedback during the revision process.

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INDEX

absence: absent 5, 111 – 120, 151, 180 – 184 activism 6, 118, 156; see also design activism Ad Hoc Atlas 5, 122 – 124, 128 – 132, 134 – 136 aesthetic 4, 6, 8n5, 10, 61, 62, 88, 105, 108, 127, 133, 138, 141, 147, 148, 152, 156, 188 – 192, 193, 195; aesthetic autonomy 5, 138, 191; aestheticization 137, 181; architectural aesthetics 142 art 4 – 6, 54 – 63, 65 – 66, 97 – 98, 102, 109, 114, 136, 137 – 148, 183, 184, 186, 188 – 192, 195; art and technology 5 – 6, 55, 98, 102 architecture 1, 8n2, 14, 15, 19, 24 – 33, 40 – 42, 45, 49, 54 – 55, 59, 112, 114, 137, 143, 180 – 181, 183 – 184, 192 artificial (artificiality) 44, 45, 119, 127 – 128, 130, 145, 146, 152, 189; habitats and structures 24 – 34; science of (Herbert Simon) 12, 72 avant-garde 6, 59 – 61, 63, 137, 138, 141, 190 Australia 25, 92, 93, 102, 104 – 105, 106, 112 – 119, 175, 176, 182 authenticity 7, 89, 182 – 183, 184, 195n1 Barthes, Roland 11, 187 Bauhaus 6, 55 Baudrillard, Jean 177 – 178, 186 Benjamin, Walter 177 Berlin 122 – 124, 128 – 129, 131 – 132, 134; Berlin Wall 18 Brisbane 97, 106, 175 – 176 capitalism 5, 17, 18, 54, 69, 71 – 73, 81, 82 – 83, 150, 151, 153, 186 – 191; neoliberalism 81, 56, 59, 154, 156, 158 – 159 China 5, 111, 137 – 148

city 42, 93, 143, 146, 165, 166, 169, 171 – 173, 175, 177 – 179, 182 – 184 communist 18, 183; see also Marxism community (communities) 27 – 28, 34, 54, 57, 64 – 67, 71, 79, 81, 112, 116 – 117, 140, 144, 146, 151, 153 – 159, 183 creative 5, 24, 31, 32, 39, 44, 57, 66, 74, 78, 80, 86, 99, 119, 144, 154 – 158; co-creative 15; creative evolution 39, 52n14; creative destruction 81 – 82, 133; creative industries 137; creative practice 39, 56, 89, 98, 103, 109, 114, 166, 188 critical 59, 61 – 62, 71, 75, 80, 82, 101, 130, 133, 136, 148, 150, 162, 186 – 187, 188, 191 – 192; critical capacity 55, 88; critical fashion 192 – 195; critical operationality 54 – 58, 61 – 67; critique 2, 5, 9 – 13, 15, 17 – 20, 54, 55 – 59, 69, 75, 80, 85 – 88, 150, 186 – 192, 195; institutional critique 63; social critique 5; see also critical design culture (cultures) 3, 38, 61, 71, 86 – 87, 192, 103, 113 – 115, 119, 125 – 128, 133, 135n3, 139, 141, 146, 167, 178, 183, 184, 187, 190 – 191; bourgeois culture 18; counter-culture 150 – 159 De Duve, Thierry 60 – 61, 66 Deleuze, Gilles 38 – 44, 48 – 50 democracy (democratic) 3, 14 – 15, 18 – 20, 21n14, 140, 150, 157 – 158 design: activism 33, 151, 157; and capacity 9, 32, 40, 45, 55, 56, 59, 87, 100, 101; collaborative 5, 33, 97, 98, 148n1, 150, 158, 163, 190; co-design 15, 54, 57 – 58, 60, 62 – 63, 105, 115 – 116, 153, 157 – 158; critical design 2 – 6, 10 – 20, 51, 85 – 89, 158, 190; intervention 6,

Index  199

14, 33, 54, 56, 79 – 80, 115 – 116, 168 – 169, 173, 190 – 193; design practice 2 – 7, 9 – 17, 19 – 20, 24 – 27, 31, 33 – 34, 38 – 39, 51, 54 – 61, 65 – 66, 69 – 71, 73, 77 – 78, 80 – 83, 85 – 86, 88 – 89, 98, 108 – 109, 113, 115, 120, 150, 155 – 156, 158, 163 – 164, 178, 186, 190, 192 – 195; design research 4, 5, 6, 38, 40, 42, 49, 51, 56, 57, 69 – 73, 87, 136; design methodology 56, 57, 70, 88, 103, 109, 135, 136, 153, 156, 158; participatory design 14 – 15, 30, 33, 71, 115, 117, 141, 156, 157; speculative design; 88 – 95; transition design 70, 82, 150, 153 – 154, 156, 158 – 159; see also science: design disaster 27, 79 – 80, 112, 175 – 184 disciplinary borders 98, 101 Dunne, Anthony and Fiona Raby 2, 3, 6, 9 – 10, 14, 15 – 16, 61, 85 – 88 dystopia 1, 4, 7, 16, 159

Kwinter, Sanford 40, 44, 52n8

ecology 25 – 26, 28, 30, 47, 120, 127, 134 – 135, 155 enlightenment 9, 11, 12, 19 – 20, 151 environment (environmental) 3, 6 – 7, 14, 24 – 25, 27, 29, 31 – 32, 45 – 46, 56 – 57, 65 – 66, 93, 103, 104, 115, 116, 117, 119, 128, 150 – 151, 153 – 155, 158 – 159, 194; built or urban environments 1, 76, 79, 101, 112, 141, 143, 146, 176, 180, 183 – 184 Europe: European 111, 161, 163

philosophy 5, 9, 11 – 12, 29, 39, 41, 48, 70, 77, 112 – 115, 151 photography 87, 93, 151, 171, 176, 180, 181, 183 plurality 17 – 18, 113, 115, 120; pluralism 71 Polidori, Robert 179 – 181, 183 – 184 posthuman 2, 3, 18, 29, see also human: limits practice based see design: design practice; see also creative practice

fashion 3, 5, 95, 98, 99, 102, 104, 140, 153, 186 – 195; body architecture 192; see also critical: fashion Foucault, Michel 2, 9, 20 Fry, Tony 2, 4, 26 – 27, 29, 70, 72, 81, 82, 150, 153, 155, 158 hacktivism 3, 5, 192, 193 hegemony 17 – 18, 192 human: capacity 1, 3, 94, 98, 118, 119, 151, 156; intervention 12, 180; limits 10, 18, 31, 32, 120 see also matter: capacity Huyssen, Andreas 178, 183, 184 identity 29, 40, 44, 48, 71, 94, 108, 117, 118, 146, 152, 178, 190, 193 immobility 165, 168, 169, 171, 172 indigenous 28, 112, 117 – 118, 120, 139, 175 indigenous-led research 118 Kulin Nation 118 Wiradjuri 118 – 119 interior 175 – 184 Japan: Japanese 5, 111 – 115, 119; see also absence and Ma

Ma 111 – 120 Malmö 130, 164, 168 – 172 manifesto 55, 122, 192 – 193, 195n1 Marxism (Karl Marx) 10 – 13, 17 – 19, 59, 61, 188, 189 material (materiality) 14, 16, 26, 29, 33, 38, 45 – 52, 60, 71, 75, 77, 82, 86 – 89, 91, 98, 105 – 109, 111 – 112, 114, 118, 120, 125, 127, 137, 144 – 145, 151, 152 – 153, 155, 158, 162 – 163, 167, 169, 171 – 173, 183, 194 materialist 6, 11, 14, 41, 189, 195 matter: capacity 40, 45, 177, 178 Melbourne 105, 107, 118 migration: asylum seeker 161, 170; and borders 6, 161 – 173; refugees 61, 170 Morris, William 94, 188, 189, 191, 192 – 193, 195 Morris, Jane 189

Raby, Fiona see Dunne, Anthony Rancière, Jacques 156, 167 reform 56, 63, 65 – 66, 127 – 130, 134, 175, 189 research 27, 31, 34, 54, 55, 61, 65 – 66, 85, 107, 119, 135, 150, 166, 169, 175 – 176, 195; see also design: research REVA 162 – 163, 165 – 169 science 9, 11 – 12, 28, 40 – 41, 43, 44, 74, 86, 93, 103 – 104, 112, 136n6, 151, 194; and design 56 – 57, 72; science fiction 86; and technology 1 – 2, 5, 6, 89, 98, 109 Shanghai 138 – 141, 145, 147 – 148 Superstudio 1 – 2, 6, 15, 175, 183, 184 Surrealism 57 – 62, 64 – 66 sustainable (sustainability) 1 – 2, 7, 14, 15, 26 – 27, 33, 78 – 83, 93, 109, 151, 153 – 154, 156, 158 – 159, 193; unsustainable 32, 152 – 153, 155, 186, 194 Sydney 105, 118 Sweden: Stockholm 163 – 164, 166, 168 – 169, 171 – 172 Tafuri, Manfredo 55, 65 – 66 technology 27, 29, 57, 74, 77, 86, 89, 91, 98 – 99, 101 – 102, 104, 106, 108, 109, 151;

200 Index

biotechnology 24, 45; nanotechology 103; see also art and technology; science and technology Ulm (Hochschule für Gestaltung, HfG) 55 – 56, 66; Max Bill 69 undesign 1 – 3, 130, 38, 44, 47, 51, 54, 58 – 59, 65 – 66, 69, 75, 111 – 113, 115, 122, 130,

133 – 135, 137 – 138, 141, 147, 162 – 163, 165, 176 – 179, 181 – 182, 184, 188; definitions 3 – 7, 40, 49 – 50, 57, 120, 148, 173 utopia 7, 16, 18, 19, 20, 159 Žižek, Slavoj 18, 21n12, 21n14, 147, 151, 155