January 21, 2021

Absenting

(Presencing)

“The satori generation…marks the emergence of a new “‘qualified power,’ the power to do and the power to undo, and the ability to enjoy doing and not doing equally. Imagine a robot with the sophistication and strength to clutch an egg without crushing it. The key concept is outgrowing growth toward degrowth. That’s the wisdom of this new generation.” (Attribution? Adbusters)  

Dialectical Critical Realist philosophy asserts that absence - its significance and impact - is under recognized and under thought in philosophy and in daily affairs. For Roy Bhaskar, presence was incoherent without absence. The absence of freedom for example gives rise to many manifestations of oppression and suffering. He defined absences both as product (something not there) and process (making something absent, or “absenting”). He also coined hybrids of these: “process-in-product (for example, the causal efficacy of the past or things at a distance), product-in-process (the exercise of causal powers, as in ongoing social activity)” (DPF 39; PE 55-6). “More generally, absence is closely related to change and hence to cause. For a change in something is the absence of something that was present, or the presence of something that was absent; and to cause something is to make a change, either of the first sort, which is what Bhaskar calls”absenting” something, or of the second sort, which Bhaskar calls “absenting absence.” Either way, to cause something is to make something — either a presence or an absence — absent” (PE 56).

Designers still tend to confuse tangible outcomes for success. Designers are trained to produce and maintain, but often what is called for is purposive absenting by means of design. For product designers in our over saturated world for example, knowing what not to build or knowing what technology or behavior to make redundant is work of the highest order. Designers are trained to conflate tangible product outcomes with successful design and most working designers still conceive of themselves as form-givers. Conventional roles continue to enmesh design professionals in processes of validating the status quo and its unsustainable consumerist ethos. Conformist perceptions of the designer’s role as that of driving demand for fabricated wants has tended to relegate designers to the ignoble provision of goods and services that compensate for lack of authenticity.

Design strategies for absence can be seen in the larger context of the information economy and the general trend toward dematerialization. Former Head of Research at Royal College of Art, founder of Doors of Perception, and author of In The Bubble, John Thackara, published “Make Sense Not Stuff” an appeal for design educational reform, away from a productivist ethic and towards a values-led ethic. As industrial designer Gianfranco Zaccai puts it “Actual physical form, in many cases, may cease to be the outcome of the design process, which could result, for example, in the elimination of a mostly unnecessary object, or the substitution of a series of electronic signals for a complex mechanical assembly” (Buchanon et al., Discovering Design 10)

The ‘Dialectic of Sustainment’ is design theorist Tony Fry’s term for design being as the decisive lever of creation and destruction. Originally conceptualized and developed with colleagues at the former Eco Design Foundation of Sydney, “design for elimination,” holds enormous strategic potential for mitigation of harm and reduction of excess. Having codified this form of redirective design practice that concerns itself with high leverage forms of design for elimination, dematerialization, and delegitimization by various means, Cameron Tonkinwise, formerly of the groundbreaking Eco Design Foundation and Parsons the New School of Design, now at Carnegie Mellon University has gone on to speculatively theorize possible future forms this practice might take. For a comprehensive discussion of design for elimination see his “Design Away” in Design as Future-Making.

This emerging design approach has been referred to my many names; redesign, undesign, redirective design, design for displacement, lightweighting, design for disappearance, design for redundancy, design for replacement, and design for remediation. This strategy will become increasingly important in removing proximate causes especially when employed as an overall asset and liability mapping strategy. Compatible with industrial ecology, Factor 4, Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing, it can be easily adopted by a diverse range of designers, engineers, manufacturers and decision makers. The absenting by design approach is coming not from what to add, but from what to take away, and/or from questioning what quality is absent and needed in a given context.

A type of reverse process engineering, design for absenting might take myriad forms at micro, meso and macro systemic scales including futuring and stewardship planning related to critical concerns such as armaments and nuclear waste. Market instruments such as cap and trade schemes are examples of large-scale systems interventions that seek to reduce hazardous particulates in the air in an effort to improve overall air quality on a regional basis. Other market instruments take the form of incentives such as fishing quotas seek to reduce the impact of the antagonist (fisheries in this case) in order to preserve a renewable stock of fish in a given body of water. Other familiar examples are disincentives such as fines and policy routes such as bans. The DeBlaisio administration has set a high standard with a 2015 ban of single-use Styrofoam products in New York City. As of this writing, plastic shopping bags have been banned or are being phased out in Mexico, India, Burma, Bangladesh, Rwanda, and Australia. Other countries are phasing the use of plastic bags out over time and also imposing disincentives such as charging for their use. Sixteen US states have banned the use of plastic shopping bags while many metropolitan areas are moving in this direction. This is a remarkable example of how multivalent combinations of initiatives can be combined to achieve results even when a product behavior is very ingrained and normative.

Strategic design for elimination is a kind of design forensics method because it requires identification and mapping of interdependent causes and effects in time and space. It’s vector can be bottom up or top down, or both, but the decisive factor is degree of focus on root causes rather than symptoms. In his superb book Sustainability by Design, John Ehrenfeld discusses what he calls the Tao of sustainability. Relating Aristotle’s categories of causality from Physics to design for sustainability, Ehrenfeld stresses that although material, formal, and efficient causes relating to function, material, manufacturing, and distribution impact are predominant considerations in industrial design impact analysis, it is equally if not more important for the designer to understand final causes - the ultimate purpose for the existence of a designed artifact (tangible or intangible). This points the designer toward the life of the artifact and what it affords or negates, how it impacts the ecologies within which it is nested, in perpetuity. Thus, the sphere of precaution and responsibility of the designer is significantly enlarged.

Designing as foresight means that our client is future generations. As designing has come to encompass multivalent forms of public communication including interfaces, platforms, processes, and services, strategic elimination design has become an essential skill for exercising wisdom in consideration of our deepening understanding of the intended and unintended consequences of the systems we put into motion. The ability to skillfully retire the wasteful and malevolent and to presence new possibilities is the way of the conscious designer. As a form of conscious strategic design foresight, absenting plays an especially important public advocacy role in communication design that discloses dysfunction or repositions wasteful lifestyle choices in the public mind, while at the same time validating, affirming and amplifying lifestyle propositions that support the public good. Strategic designs to invalidate destructive or deleterious products, processes and behaviors may take the form of multivalent marketing campaigns using celebrity endorsements and other mainstream advocacy tools to position life-positive behaviors as cool and life-negating products, behaviors and services un-cool or undesirable, thus reducing demand for those goods and weakening their markets. Absenting is tailor-made for conscious designers - a superhero design strategy for a world both bloated with excess and imperiled by poverty. Absenting is a form of design acupuncture that works by eliminating the barriers and providing what’s missing.

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