January 21, 2021

Deepening

(Flattening)

“Our challenge is to bring ethics to the techno-sphere” Ken Wilber

I duck into the women’s restroom at O’Hare Airport shortly before my flight departure. Twisting my body-and-suitcase awkwardly into the two-tight stall, the smart toilet greets me by helpfully rearranging the crinkly plastic sanitary sleeve on the toilet seat. After the toilet is finished, I sit down. After I’m finished, the toilet once again obliges by flushing automatically after auto-detecting my movements. Then, just as everything was going so swimmingly between the two of us, the toilet, I’ll call her Lois, flushed a second time spewing public toilet water onto my face and hands. Low flow auto flush toilets in theory lower impact, but when their motion sensors trigger at inappropriate times they defeat the waste reduction goal of the technology and are in the end, sometimes more wasteful than no intervention. Moreover, the quality of the experience of my bio break, however mundane, lacks coherence and thickness - I’ll remember it as a missed design opportunity.

Got depth? In our contemporary globalized world, we circulate through a lot of branded “non-places” that in their flatness are not dwell able. Modernity has tended to occlude the interior dimensions of reality in favor of tangible concreteness. Like Weber and Habermas, Wilber noted that modernity differentiated the three irreducible knowledge domains - art, science, and humanities (or I, We, It in integral terminology) but then disastrously failed to reintegrate these domains, resulting in what he dubbed “flatland” a reductive pseudoreality resting on an “industrial ontology” where only the exteriors of beings and things - observed, sensed and empirically known - are mirrored as “truth.” This third person objective flatland has simple location and quantity, but lacks quality. Integral theory understands Marxism, eco-philosophy, and industrial design as products of the industrial paradigm that, from very different perspectives, perpetuate and legitimize it.

The designed world expresses the bio- psycho- social- cultural- evolution of reality. Therefore, the industrial ontologies of flatland take form as the designed world. As encoders of culture, designers are very familiar with all the ways flatland shows up as a hollow world lacking in interiority. In fact, the hollow one-dimensionality of so much of our contemporary industrially designed world was probably a negative example that inspired you to become a designer in order to improve things! As designers we know that relegating design work to aesthetics and styling at the tail end of the product development process misses the opportunity for deep insights that impact the problem framing. These and other fragmenting industrial practices suck depth out of designed artifacts and services. The structuring logics of flatland are technocentric and compartmentalized. They lack depth and subtlety. They optimize efficiency and uniformity. They tend to reduce everything to representations. Our modern, flatland ways of designing solve for hygiene, convenience, and speed. Operationalized for flatland, design breaks its promise to humanize our world.

Due to the pervasive nature of design, and its prevailing preference for the exteriors of things, we tend to overlook the reciprocal impacts of the built environment upon the nested ecologies of body, mind, psyche, polis and spirit (Bateson, Naess). Designers, being experts in cultural encoding also recognize the deepening impulse that characterizes postmodernity. If the great task of modernity was/is to clearly differentiate consciousness, culture and nature in order to lift humanity out of the undifferentiated mythical and magical worldviews, then the great task of postmodernity was/is to transcend flatland by re-integrating the dimensions of reality. Healthy postmodernism preserves modernity’s clear differentiation of the domains of reality - the arts, humanities and sciences- without regression to premodern worldspaces. (Wilber, BHOE, p. 251-253) Postmodernism reintroduces the depth dimension of values and subjective interiors, lending experiential richness. Yet the postmodern worldview is in its own ways sacrificing depth for relativism.

In Integral Sustainable Design: transformative perspectives, author Mark DeKay shows how integral design approaches reintegrate The Good (the humanities), The True (the sciences), and The Beautiful (the arts) without conflating them, in any project be it a climate adaptation strategy or local food network. As an architect, DeKay is critical of architectural methods that emphasize flatland systems. In an integral studies view, this mainstream ecological architectural approach is considered partial because it deals only with the manifest physical world and thus is skewed toward what can be located, measured and quantified, omitting the interior dimensions of subjective individual and collective experiences. For example, individual interpretive dimensions of experience, if they are accounted for at all, may not to be integrated with robust analytical data and building performance metrics. Integral Sustainable Design can be seen as a kind of explanation for the slow emergence of catalytic social tipping points toward flourishing. Seen in larger perspective, such partial approaches are shortcomings by no means unique to the design professions; they typify a common bias toward exteriors and surfaces that can be described as characteristic of Modernity.

Integral design focuses on reintegration of the arts and humanities with the sciences while preserving their irreducible differences and their respective truth claims; “…1) consciousness, subjectivity, self, self-expression (including art), whose motive truth involves truthfulness and sincerity; 2)  ethics, morality, worldview, culture, intersubjective meaning, whose mode of truth involves justice; 3) science, technology, objective nature, whose motive truth involves correct propositions. Thus, Integral Ecology unites the art of ecology, the Beautiful (environmental aesthetics; the morals of ecology, the Good (environmental ethics); and the science of ecology, the True (environmental science) at multiple levels of complexity.” (Integral Ecology, p.22) 

Even as postmodern sensibilities bring welcome perspective-rich thickness to the designed world, our contemporary production logics are still optimized for modern flatness (Friedman). Despite the influence of emotional design, interaction design, human-centered and other postmodern forms of design practice, our designing is still quite often reduced to its tangible objectives expressions. Because Modernity is emerging multi-temporally across the contemporary developing world, the modern tendency to flatten and dissociate The True from The Good and The Beautiful are very much with us despite the influence of the postmodern cultural milieu.

The next time you find yourself regretting you bought olive oil in the precision pump dispenser, or falling for that 2-for-1 deal only to discover that both jars were half-empty, I hope that you can map these flatland logics onto your own design practices. In writing this I wish to put a label on these all too familiar flatland industrial design ontologies that show up in the many worlds of contemporary design. Developmentally, the design professions are integrating, including and transcending modern beliefs, values and methodologies. In reintegrating interiors with exteriors and un-collapsing and wholing what had formerly been fragmented, we propose design possibilities that reveal the mutual interpenetration of all dimensions of reality. The design professions, as they evolve in relation to society, transcend and include their former more partial flatland roles enabling the making of deeper contributions by design. Like. Tweet.

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