with just a bit of hope, the idea that an appreciation for complexity coupled with the power of clear vision might help the world find a way through its current mess.
It all has that surreal feeling of trying to reason with a bully in a schoolyard who is holding your lunchbox. You say, “Give me my lunchbox.” They say, “I don’t have your lunchbox.” You say, “It’s in your right hand.” They say, “There’s nothing in my right hand.” Then you look around for witnesses because that’s the only way to validate what you’re experiencing. You want someone to whom you can say, “You can see, right, that he’s got my lunchbox in his left hand now?” But there’s nobody there
Today, it is much more obvious that most of our problems—climate change, poverty, obesity and chronic disease, or modern terrorism—cannot be solved simply with more resources and greater control. That is because they are the result of complex adaptive systems that are often the result of the tools used to solve problems in the past, such as endlessly increasing productivity and attempts to control things. This is where second-order cybernetics comes into play—the cybernetics of self-adaptive complex systems, where the observer is also part of the system itself.
As Kevin Slavin says in Design as Participation,
“You’re Not Stuck
In Tra�c—You Are Tra�c.”1
Spotify, for example, has invested heavily in its own curation services — both algorithmic and human — after finding that many of its listeners were baffled by superabundance, burdened by excessive choice and uninterested in charting their own paths through the digital wilderness. And while TikTok has successfully recruited users as producers, it has also perfected a fully passivized mode of consumption: Its algorithmic “For You” feed seems to offer an irresistibly gratifying and uncannily personalized stream of videos that requires no choice whatsoever by the consumer. All you need do is occasionally tap a heart icon or flick a finger to skip an unengaging video.*<?>**
**
"When humans perform a prescribed burn, the goal is to remove that layer of decay in a controlled manner, allowing the other, healthy parts of the ecosystem to thrive" 2
Brubaker, R. (2023, January 3). Does Digital Connectivity * Democratize Culture? NOEMA. https://www.noemamag.com/ /hyperconnected-culture-and-its-discontents
Developing a sensibility and a culture of flourishing — a term that has taken on especial significance since Elizabeth Anscombe’s 1958 essay — and embracing a diverse array of measures of “success” depend less on the accumulation of power and resources and more on diversity and the richness of experience. This is the paradigm shift that we need.
The theory is if you take the blue pill you continue living in your illusional state. If you take the red pill, you see the true reality that sits under the surface of your illusion. It’s a binary choice. You can be in a reality they want you to believe, or you can choose to go into a much less comfortable reality. 3
*
* * Zuckerman, E., & Gessen, M. (2019, July 15). Unreality and Social Corrosion: Masha Gessen and Ethan Zuckerman in Conversation. Journal of Design and Science.
https://doi.org/10.21428/7808da6b.9ee0ae50
The Model-dependent realism view coined by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow accounts for this view of reality, where an objective, independent reality cannot be found, and any model of reality is just a frame to put a picture in.
we approach the notion of photographic ubiquity not as a given but as a kind of orthodoxy from the technical beginnings of what you identify as device-based photography in 1839, through the era of Kodak to the age of the internet; that is, an idea with a history. This is akin to a term you deploy in your own work, omnipres- ence, as A everywhere, either in actuality or virtually so.
How do we best think through the interrelations and intercon- nections of pervasive imperial destruction and mass-distributed im- perial constructions, and how does the omnipresence of photography figure in these operations? Does potential history seek to redistribute alternative constructions at a world scale, or does it refuse projects of ubiquity altogether?
There is something troubling about this kind of common chronology of photography as a realm apart—as if there are given points on the timeline—the invention of the device, the Kodak, digital, etc.—
Potential History is also a kind of manifesto against the discipline of his- tory, whose raison d’être is the existence of a past of which historians become experts. Becoming experts of “the past” means operating in a different time frame than that in which those studied by the historians exist and act.
The question is how to depart from the imperial organization of knowledge that anchors our activities on the specificity of genres or media and rather anchor them in principles of overdue justice, and cultivate a commitment.*
Lewis, J. W., & Parry, K. (2021, December .15). Ubiquity. Leuven University Press The Compass of Repair”: An Interview“ .13 . with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay Jacob W. Lewis & Kyle Parry
“Ariella Azoulay makes a simple and profound claim. Every photograph bears the traces of the encounter between the photographer and the photographed, and neither party can ultimately control that inscription nor determine what happens to those traces. The photograph, she tells us, fixes nothing and belongs to no one. This untethering of photography from responsibility, at least in its traditional sense, allows her to approach the ethics and politics specific to photography in a completely new way. Even or especially when it is a photograph of a crime or an injustice, a photograph is more than evidence. It imposes another sort of obligation on us, to address and readdress it in a way that challenges what it shows of our life together. Azoulay’s breathtaking book finally demands nothing less of us than to reimagine how, in the age of the photograph, we might become citizens again.”
photography was institutionalized as a pro- ductive practice, whose products can be appropriated by sovereign sub- jects and institutions (state archives are emblematic) through violence. This violence resembles the violence used to institutionalize the body politic as if it consists only of sovereign citizens and not of the rest of the governed. Both formations are premised on the negation of the par- ticipation of those at the expense of whom such sovereign positions are formed. Through the process of unlearning what was institutionalized in the discourse of experts, and instead interacting with those whose worlds and lives were rendered extractable, exploitable, and disposable through them, the centrality of the photograph (as private property) to photography seemed in correlation with and serviceable for/benefiting the differential political regimes that invented citizenship as an asset given to some and denied to others.
Photography was never actually only what photographers produce; rather, it is an arena wherein many participate even as these participants are exposed to or targeted by violence. This is, in a nutshell, the political ontology of photography.
Potential History is also a manifesto against history. The past, I argue in the book, is an imperial invention that provides impunity to the different operators of the different imperial violent technologies that destroy the world. Photography, like archives and museums (that I also study as technologies), render the past palpable, in a way that scholars and laypersons alike are trained to recognize
For the past to exist as a separate tense everywhere, and for modernity to be “its” future, and for the transition from the one to the other to be experienced as unavoidable and organic—many different temporal formations and diverse worlds in which they made sense had to be destroyed. The challenge of Potential History is how not to lose sight of this ubiquitous destruction and, at the same time, how to reconfigure the ontology of photography in a way that allows us to continue both to engage with it in order not to forget this mass destruction, and to transform it into the compass of repair.*
"inter-images" emerge from spaces beween the data, existing as possibilities adjacent to the images of human memory (i.e., photographs), likely to appear but not already existing.
This spatial description of the emergence of dream images is not a bad description of how humans, too, conjure and create new images, from atent spaces adjacent to the images we already know and understand.
Incrementally, we add to a collective set, and hopefully, from time to ime, new forms emerge, and we recognize an original quality.
Archives have the capacity to serve as powerful sites of historical engagement, with material that can be mobilized to facilitate critical inquiry into complex historical dynamics, such as the relationship of preservation and cultural value. But collections don't do this on their own: they must be activated, and the method of that engagement can produce vastly different results.
“Most tools employed for cognition are bound by rules and codes. When in the art mode, one may unbind them, disassemble any idea or event in terms of logic and illogic, practicality and absurdity, to then rearticulate it and add for whatever purpose.” Yet, artistic methodologies are absent from current curricula, they are excluded because the exploration of the unknown is considered esoteric, elitist or mythical, and, inherently, as use-less.*
*Barjonet, L., Delaunay, F., Boutet, D., & Leyrissoux, C. (2019, December). Convergence dans un dispositif de coordination et d’intégration. Actualités Pharmaceutiques, 58(591), 35–37. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.actpha.2019.10.009
Skepticism, in Harris-Babou’s rendering, might free you or plunge you into an endless rabbit hole of paranoia, particularly when combined with utter systemic abandonment. Worse still, the choice is rarely entirely yours, inextricably bound up in the contexts and systems we are each inextricably part of, oppressed by, or forced to comply with.
Vaguely stirring piano chords score the artist’s entrance to a dilapidated old barn, an architectural trope ripped straight from the pages of RH’s notorious “source books,” in which rampant cultural appropriation is wielded in service of concocting a slick, yet perfectly rustic, Modernist aesthetic. *
Lopez Cassell & Kunsthaus Hamburg. (2021, October). Smoke, Mirrors, and 1 Splinters . Https://Static1.Squarespace.Com/Static/5e1777101e1cfa39fe18d7a5/t/615b20749184a2002122 .1b28/1633362036433/FINALCOLOR_Ilana+Harris-Babou_2021_WEB%2BABB_gru%CC%88n.Pdf
Silicon Valley think tank RethinkX claim that technological progress is guaranteed by “the reality of fast-paced, technology-adoption S-curves” (Seba & Tubbs 2019: 3). As one flattens out, the narrative goes, another disruptive technology emerges, creating a neverending chain of S-curves. In a world of no stable meanings, this progress is a welcome guarantee. S-curves are, however, a historically contingent narrative structure, rather than a reality.
Their roots—the “general idea of exponential accelerating change” (Broderick 2012: 21)—go back to a science fiction author, Robert A. Heinlein, who in 1952 projected what he called the “curve of human achievement” to “go on indefinitely with increasing steepness” (quoted in Broderick 2021: 21). That the statement of this belief would emerge simultaneous with the Great Acceleration is no accident. From here the idea develops until popularized most famously by Vernor Vinge, who proposed that exponentially accelerating science and technology would produce a Singularity; “a point where our models must be discarded and a new reality rules” (Vinge, np.). The narrative of the Singularity and the desires and values it harnesses are far older than its current digital flavour. It is at bottom a utopian narrative, about the desire to be freed from the burdens of history and necessity and from frustrations and restrictions on agency: a narrative of liberation from mediation, of carving the island from the mainland.
We are in complex co-dependent relationships, and data is the glue that binds us.
Conservation agreements: everybody wins or everybody loses.
In “Resisting Reduction: A Manifesto,” Joi Ito calls for a cultural change in which we value systems that are diverse and complex beyond our ability to understand, rather than trying to simplify the world into short-sighted models. However, just as technological acceleration is not new, this backlash has its own long history. If we want to resist reduction in practice, it’s worth revisiting earlier movements reacting to previous cultural shifts.
It is only through constant contact with newly evolving techniques,“ with the discovery of new materials, and with new ways of putting things together, that the creative individual can learn to bring the design of objects into a living relationship with tradition and from that point to develop a new attitude towards design”.9 405 Adrian Bowyer, initiator of the RepRap open source 3D printer project, 2011 Photograph: Georgie Clarke
Mitchell, T. (2000, January 1). Questions of Modernity. U of Minnesota Press. http://books. google.ie/books?id=wzCIgb9bzscC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Questions+of+Modernit y+edited+by+Timothy+Mitchell&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api
But design values and history is taught through a canon; that accepted pantheon of work by predominantly“ European and American male designers that sets the basis for what is deemed “good” or “bad.” The authority of the canon has undermined the work produced by non-Western cultures and those from poorer backgrounds so that Ghanaian textiles, for example, get cast as craft rather than design. Classifying traditional craft as different from modern design deems the histories and practices of design from many cultures inferior. We should aim to eliminate the false distinctions between craft and design, in order to recognize all culturally important forms of making. Design thinking rhetoric is similarly exclusive: to frame design thinking as a progressive narrative of global salvation ignores
4 *”alternative ways of knowing
" They remind us every day that despite our best intentions, we do not live in a world where there is perfect identity between objects and things, but one in which objects as well as the categories, meanings, relations, functions, boundaries, and forms of imagination that we thread through them —are being constantly undermined, displaced, and undone by the aimless but relentless rebellion of things. They remind us that we live in a world in which the identity between objects and things is always fragile and breaks down over time" (Fernando Domínguez Rubio, 2020)
Instead of discussing “sustainability” as something to be “solved” in the context of a world where bigger is still better and more than enough is NOT too much, perhaps we should examine the values and the currencies of the fitness functions and consider whether they are suitable and appropriate for the systems in which we participate.
Developing a sensibility and a culture of flourishing — a term that has taken on especial significance since Elizabeth Anscombe’s 1958 essay — and embracing a diverse array of measures of “success” depend less on the accumulation of power and resources and more on diversity and the richness of experience. This is the paradigm shift that we need. 5*
*Ito, J. (2017, October 13). Resisting Reduction: A Manifesto. Journal of Design and Science. https://doi.org/10.21428/8f7503e4
Why is it so hard for us to live in tension? Why is it so hard for us to ?live with warring binary states
I think there’s the human condition question, which is easier to answer. Then there’s the case study in Trump. The answer to the human condition is that it’s psychologically very, very difficult for humans to not have a straight story. We know that people who have been in situations of unpredictable reality—whether it’s in cults, in camps or in totalitarian countries—display what psychologists call fragmentation, because that’s the only way the human mind can deal with such unpredictability. You just inhabit whatever is given to you at any given time and that’s how you cope. It’s possibly the best adaptation there is because otherwise you just can’t 6.take the pressure
ILLUSTRATION 1: Global policies and pledges effects on greenhouse gas emissions and warming scenarios, overlaid with data on the tipping points and effects and outcomes of those warming scenarios, highlighting the inadequacy of both current policies and ambitious pathways. Visualisation by Dark matter labs based on ( Illustration source 1 on page 43
It is absolutely not about prediction, but asking what if..., speculating, imagining, and even dreaming, to create and facilitate reflection on the kind of technologically mediated world we wish to live in. Ideally, one that reflects the complex, troubled people we are, rather than the easily satisfied consumers and users we are supposed to be. 7
You use abstractions as tools because they help clarify things. They’re very valuable tools, a lot of people lived and died to build a decent abstraction. It’s a really valuable tool. You don’t do baby-and-bathwater nonsense, but you’re rooted in the Earth, and I feel like that means you’re rooted in mortality. You’re not rooted in transcendence, you’re not rooted in transcending death, you’re not rooted in the solution, you’re rooted in making life good.
Indeed, I propose that engaging with post-extractive landscapes is a vital aspect of reframing the dialogue against catastrophe, and of being empowered by it. As humans stand on the brink of the post-anthropocene, we must adopt new – or old – ways to be, ways to relate to the world and other(s) within it. Whether contemporary experimentation with these modes happens in post-extractive, urban, rural or post-industrial landscapes, collectively humanity faces an extraordinary opportunity to 8 .reshape itself within the world it has created
"...Under the shiny new assemblages promised, even if they are achieved, nothing will have fundamentally changed without engagement with the past, and with the present as shaped by that past. Narratives of rupture, whether catastrophic or utopian, serve one key purpose. They keep us tied to the basic structures of the present moment, and rob us of agency to uproot them. The specificity of catastropheas-rupture is that by claiming we are in an in-between period, it both suggests that the basic structures are shifting already and that we must fall back on what we have and know simply in order to survive. No infinite possibility here: instead ‘everything is changing’ and ‘now is not the time to change things.’ One rupture is met by another: by promising a rupture that will fix everything – some new technology or other – techno-utopianism also suggests at the same time that ‘everything will change’ and that ‘we are already doing the right thing to bring about that change’. Both reject any possibility of engaging with History and Politics, instead they suggest that all we need to do is hold on, push a little further, keep going a little longer, and we will reach some state of rest or at least reset. But this is not the case, it is only a narrative trick, to maintain a sense of breathless movement while remaining unable to consider action that might tackle the problems we face at a more fundamental political level. 9*
CHANGE AS:
“an innovative tool to design and evaluate social change initiatives. By creating a blueprint of the building blocks required to achieve a social change initiative’s long-term goal, such as improving a neighborhood’s literacy levels or academic achievement, a theory of change offers a clear roadmap to achieve your results, identifying the preconditions, pathways, and interventions necessary for an initiative’s success.*”
Scenario thinking is a tool for motivating people to challenge the status quo, or get better at doing so, by asking “What if?” Asking “What if?” in a disciplined way allows you to rehearse the possibilities of tomorrow, and then to take action today empowered by those provocations and insights. What if we are about to experience a revolutionary change that will bring new challenges for nonprofits?
Or enter a risk-averse world of few gains, yet few losses? What if we experience a renaissance of social innovation? And, importantly, what if the future brings new and unforeseen opportunities or challenges for your organization? Will you be ready to act?
knowledge is a chain of narratival processes to which new materials are constantly being attached from an everchanging cultural world, identities and knowledge being perpetually formed and accumulated via the contingent joining together of stories. Narratives thus serve as both the starting point and the teleological terminating point.*10
Whole new worlds are imagined by writers, film-makers, and artists. Could this approach be integrated into design education so design schools could become a source of alternative ideas and counter narratives, materialised through design, that provoke thought and further imagining about the kind of worlds people wish to live in rather than prescribing any one particular future or communicating a vision of how things will, or should be?
A design education like this would probably no longer be organised around disciplines but instead, maybe, different ways of seeing the world. Its students and faculty would study, experiment with, and deepen understanding of the mechanics of unreality — utopias, dystopias and heterotopias; what ifs and as ifs; hypotheses, thought experiments and reductio ad absurdum; counterfactuals and uchronia, and so on. Synthesising ideas from political science, anthropology, sociology, history, economics and philosop into new worldviews made tangible through an expanded form of design practice. 11
Magasines
Articles
/// Computer Signals | Art and Biology in the Age of Digital Experimentation
/// Effects of air pollution exposure on social behavior: a synthesis and call for research
/// The Development Dictionary
/// The Hofmann Lab
/// Materials against materiality
/// Resilient systems and cosmopolitan localism — The emerging scenario of the small, local, open and connected space
/// Back to the Future | How tradition inspires contemporary making
/// The Digital Craftsman and His Tools
/// Speculative Design: Crafting the Speculation
/// The Barometer of Life
/// Preserving the unpreservable: docile and unruly objects at MoMA
/// Risk_Society and Environmental Policy
/// Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum
/// Design fictions an introduction and provisional taxonomy
/// Catalogue for a fictional First Design Biennale of Experimental Micronations | Designed Realities Lab
/// ART AS A MODE OF ACTION Some Problems with Gell’s Art and Agency
/// On the discrepancy between objects and things: An ecological approach
/// The Material Production of the Spiral Jetty: A Study of Culture in the Making
/// Residential Mobility, Well-Being, and Mortality
/// Inventory and Hinge. Entangled Fields of Research in the Arts
/// Walking The Circle – The 4 Guiding Pillars For A Circular Economy: Efficient Material Management, Reduction Of Toxic Substances, Energy Efficiency And Economic Incentives
Agnotology
A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Production of Ignorance (and Its Study) 15
fragmentation noun [ U ]
the action or process of breaking something into small parts or of being broken up in this way: 13
Genealogy [ U ]
(the study of) the history of the past and present members of a family or families. 14
cultural appropriation
The act of taking or using things from a culture that is not your own, especially without showing that you understand or respect this culture: cultural appropriation. 12
A heritage craft is defined as "a practice which employs manual dexterity and skill at the point of production, an understanding of traditional materials, design and techniques, and which has been practised for two or more successive generations".
A spolia (Latin: "spoils"; sing.: spolium) is a stone taken from an old structure and repurposed for new construction or decorative purposes.
Crafts classified as ‘endangered’ are those which currently have sufficient craftspeople to transmit the craft skills to the next generation, but for which there are serious concerns about their ongoing viability. This may include crafts with a shrinking market share, an ageing demographic or crafts with a declining number of practitioners. Stagg, R. (2023, May 20). These 17 heritage crafts are now considered “critically endangered.” Country Living. https://www.countryliving.com/uk/news/a43917684/heritage-crafts-critically-endangered/
extended
: drawn out in length especially of time
: fully stretched out
landless
used to refer to people who do not have any land for farming or who are prevented from owning the land that they farm by the economic system or by rich people who own a lot of land:
inheritance
: the act of inheriting property
: the reception of genetic qualities by transmission from parent to offspring
: the acquisition of a possession, condition, or trait from past generations heritage - property that descends to an heir
legacy
of, relating to, or being a previous or outdated computer system a candidate for membership in an organization (such as a school or fraternal order) who is given special status because of a familial relationship to a member\
cultural anthropology
This approach can be applied in cultural anthropology where we can chart out the perceptions of the world in other cultures.
maker culture
Maker culture emphasizes informal, networked, peer-led, and shared learning motivated by fun and self-fulfillment.- Maker culture encourages novel applications of technologies, and the exploration of intersections between traditionally separate domains and ways of working including metal-working, calligraphy, film making, and computer programming.
cultural appropriation
The act of taking or using things from a culture that is not your own, especially without showing that you understand or respect this culture: cultural appropriation. (2023, November 1). https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/ english/cultural-appropriation
Birthright something possessed as a result of one's natural situation or birth
Endnotes
1
.)National Geographic, The Ecological Benefits of Fire( 2 Zuckerman, E., & Gessen, M. )2019, July 15(. Unreality and Social Corrosion: 3 Masha Gessen and Ethan Zuckerman in Conversation. Journal of Design and Science. https:// doi.org/10.21428/7808da6b.9ee0ae50 R / D. )n.d.(. R / D. https://www.readingdesign.org/decolonizing-design — 4
5 Ito, J. )2017, October 13(. Resisting Reduction: A Manifesto. Journal of Design and Science. https://doi.org/10.21428/8f7503e4
6 Zuckerman, E., & Gessen, M. )2019, July 15(. Unreality and Social Corrosion: Masha Gessen and Ethan Zuckerman in Conversation. Journal of Design and Science. https://doi.org/10.21428/7808da6b.9ee0ae50
7 Dunne & Raby. )n.d.(.
https://dunneandraby.co.uk/content/projects/543/0
8 Zuckerman, E., & Gessen, M. )2019, July 15(. Unreality and Social Corrosion: Masha Gessen and Ethan Zuckerman in Conversation. Journal of Design and Science. https://doi.org/10.21428/7808da6b.9ee0ae50
Williams, R. )2022, December 4(. Narratives of Rupture )Catastrophe/Utopia/ 9 .Singularity( — Against Catastrophe. Against Catastrophe https:// againstcatastrophe.net/energydispatchblog/williams
Kizel, A. (2021, February 28). the facilitator as liberator and enabler: ethical 10 responsibility in communities of philosophical inquiry. Childhood & Philosophy, 17, 14. https:// doi.org/10.12957/childphilo.2021.53450
11 A Larger Reality — R / D. )n.d.(. R / D. https://www.readingdesign.org/a-larger- reality
12 )2023, November 1(. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/cultural- appropriation
13 fragmentation. )2024, January 3(. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fragmentation
14 genealogy. )2023, November 22(. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/ english/genealogy
15 Proctor, R., Schiebinger, L., & Schiebinger, L. L. )2008, January 1(. Agnotology. http://books.google.ie/books?id=jDDFwAEACAAJ&dq=AGNOTOLOG+Y+The+Mak ing+and+Unmaking+of+Ignorance&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api
16 Tamboukou, M. )2014, July 29(. )2009( ‘Leaving the self, Nomadic passages in the memoir of a woman artist. Australian Feminist Studies, 24:61, 307-324. Uel. www.academia.edu/251021/_2009_Leaving_the_self_Nomadic_passages_in_the_https:// memoir_of_a_woman_artist_Australian_Feminist_Studies_24_61_307_324
17 )Tamboukou, 2014, p.3(
18
Ito, J. )2017, October 13(. Resisting Reduction: A Manifesto. Journal of Design and Science. https://doi.org/10.21428/8f7503e4
References
Fernando Domínguez Rubio. (2020). Still life: ecologies of the modern imagination at the art museum. Chicago, Illinois; London: The University Of Chicago Press. Manzini, E., & M’Rithaa, M. K. )2016(. Distributed Systems And Cosmopolitan Localism: An Emerging Design Scenario For Resilient Societies. Sustainable Development, 24)5(, 275–280. https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.1628
Erler, M. )2019(. Playing Intelligence. Journal of Design and Science. https://jods. mitpress.mit.edu/pub/0l8x7kip