January 21, 2021

Crisising

(Opportuniting)

“We are the catastrophe.” Keith Witt

Although our eponymous Anthropocene era represents a mere blink of an eye in evolutionary time, our productive capacities have outstripped our wisdom, exponentially growing to achieve astonishing scale and power, and with it capacity to destabilize planetary ecosystems resulting in irreversible losses. Our everyday anthro-, ego- and ethno-centric habits of Being make us a threat to ourselves, and to other forms of life. Because causes and effects— if we can even use those words in the nonlinear multiverse — are distant in time and space, the everyday ways that we interact with our surroundings, ordinary as they may feel, are in fact the crisis. Roy Bhaskar, the founding theorist of Critical Realism and Meta-Reality, used the term “crisis system” to refer to the complex of intersystemic “wicked problems” that are endemic to our times. “Crisis system” expresses that the crises of our times are multiple ontologies with many interlocking features and manifestations that are internalized, institutionalized, and normalized.

Critical Realism uses explanatory critique, or the process of retroduction, to examine the designed world as a result of aggregated collective practices, processes and policies. In explanatory critique we ask, “what had to be true of our world in order for the crisis system to be the result?” The crises of our times are the unintended consequences, relationally issued forth, by our collective design configurations. Too often however, the agentive power of designing is hidden in plain sight as background to the foreground complex of interrelated global Wicked Problems. Our very being is the crisis. Crisis is a simultaneous aspect of self and world, never merely external to us. Once seen, this cannot be un-seen. We acknowledge the impacts that our human population and our daily practices are having in aggregate on our environment. We are collectively, unfoldingly, the temporal agentic being of crisis. What is unsustainable then is our very way of being human.

If the bad news is that we are the crisis, then the good news is that we are the opportunity. Because the ecological crisis -for example - is a designing, enacting process, the bringing of consciousness to designing can aid expansion of possibilities and mitigation of harm. As human beings, we are not reducible merely to crisis —on the contrary we are so much more than crisis —and that is precisely the point. We often get hung up debating over causes. To claim and embrace crisis —not as the results or as the effects of human civilization— but as the very ontology of human Being, is not about blame but rather about expanding our sense of identity. Although our normative beliefs and our language hold us apart from others and from environment, the stories that we keep telling about our separation are beginning to break down, revealing our radical interdependency with this broken home that nevertheless holds us and sustains our existence.

Organizatinal theorist Russell L. Ackoff described complex problems as ‘messes’ while the term ‘Wicked Problem’ was coined by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in the context of social planning in 1973. Richard Buchanan contextualized such problem spaces in design in his essay “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking.” Such ‘problems’ are ill defined, with multiple, inter-dependent causes and impacts which may be distant in time and/or space. They cannot be ‘solved’ using linear operations. These dynamic conditional spaces that we may label ‘crises’ are ever-evolving, having no end-point. Today given the information revolution, the exponential proliferation of technology, and the complexities of supply chain, distribution and post consumer waste management, the kinds of problems confronted by product development teams are de facto wicked by virtue of the complexity of the world that we live in. Contemporary global crises such as hunger, inter-generational conflict and environmental contamination fit the definition of Wicked. And although it might not seem to be the case, conscious design of seemingly simple products such as beverage packaging are, if comprehensively framed and skillfully addressed via design are necessarily wicked problems. Complexity is always present because we are living, breathing and being it. 

Experiencing crisis on the scale of climate change, as cumulative, aggregate and multiplicative forces accruing over periods longer than our individual lifespans, it’s difficult nay impossible to comprehend with the mind. As designers we often feel impotent or beleaguered. How can designers act on the enormity of this truth emotionally as well as intellectually, without collapsing in resignation or overwhelm? How might we act from hope and a sense of inter-agency?

There are many ways of modeling how deep structural and transformative change occurs and how to best facilitate it. We may work on incremental as well as scalar change that originate in a bottom-up way from local everyday behaviors. We may analyze systems of systems. We may work to build alternative platforms and scenarios that make old structures obsolete. On closer observation, when we map and analyze inter-systemic issues, we hold them at arms length to externalize and make sense of them. Yet any sense that we are separate from our broken systems is an illusion. It’s important to be conscious that as designers and as citizens we are the system. When we function in accordance with the norms and best practices of the design professions we re-inscribe the broken and breaking structures of demi-real (Bhaskar) institutions and agreements, reinforcing them, and granting them solidity. This is everywhere evident in efforts to make broken systems work in all sectors. Such efforts to deliver more and better within the same strategic approach often yield only disappointment because our tactics may change but our strategic assumptions remain at play. We are the system and we participate in the maintenance of our existing systems by virtue of collective agreements, values, and behaviors. Existing regulatory, political, legal and economic structures “design” the world through and as, us. <Absenting - Presencing>

Leadership in design often relates to accurate discernment of the structuring logics that govern a given context coupled with the ability to operate as the system. Design theorist Alain Findeli describes a shift from solving problems to shifting systems as a way of designing in cooperation with emergence. In order to elicit experiences that attune us to the qualitative dimensions of experience the designer must sense and become the system. The conscious designer merges with and becomes the crisis system. She often innovates in the creation of conditions by which the system can shift. In a process of designing-as-becoming, these leaders cultivate the ability to hold the tensions and complexities of the present while sensing into the emergent future. They have a transpersonal set of motivating visions from which they motivate others. These initiatives inspire the heart-mind while engaging audacious regional and global-scale social, economic and ecological change.

Crisis and incoherence can be experienced as paralyzing and overwhelming and also paradoxically, as sources of energy for transformation. Our most acute wicked problems exist at just such pressure and pain points. The opportunities afforded by high-stakes challenges and times of great catastrophe are well documented. In fact, times of social, political and economic upheaval are strongly correlated with breakthrough innovation. In Spiral Dynamics theory, the Gamma Trap describes the most radical change condition of a dissipative system. It indicates high levels of dissonance in the functional fit between the organism and its contextual life conditions. This condition is familiar to all of us as social holons participating in and relating within multiple systems — many of which are broken or breaking down.

Our crises will be met only in the real-time conscious presence of reflective designing practitioners. Experiencing crisis from the inside out —as the crisis— is cathartic. We rage, deny, bargain, acknowledge, grieve and eventually come to accept crisis from our heart —not from our mind.  Being the crisis and feeling the crisis from the inside out offers a fresh perspective. As our boundaries soften we begin to see that who we are being, and what we are being, is a process inherited from the past and brought forward into the present. When we are able to perform this dual move of first, acknowledging crisis, and second, embracing crisis — on the scale of our own individual daily behaviors, habits, values, relationships, and agreements —we reframe crisis as opportunity.

Crisis is a gift. Crisis calls us to grow our human capacities to re-imagine and to reveal worlds as consciously designing human beings. This frees up energy to move out of blame and victimhood and to be and become that process of being alive that has an eye always toward the future. We were born for these challenges. In fact this book Design Being expresses the paradox that crisis co-arises as a characteristic of our ways of being and becoming. Because we cannot get to a viable future from our current way of being, conscious heart-centered designing is necessarily a path of personal growth and transformation. How does conscious designing use complexity and dissonance to elicit the latent potentials of the system? How might designed interactions serve adaptive learning and decision-making?

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