January 21, 2021

Destroying

(Creating)

“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” J. Robert Oppenheimer 

Like Shiva, the Creator-Destroyer archetype in Hinduism, our human creativity demonstrates the mutable plasticity of the world. ​Our designed world has placed our species in danger of extinction, yet paradoxically human innovation and design also represents the greatest flowering of our creative brilliance. Designing reflects a spectrum of consciousness from malevolence to beneficence. Conscious designing - the willing to take responsibility for creating and destroying - necessitates constant management of the instrumental-substantive polarity.

Fundamentally, human beings arise with their environment as the energies of creation and destruction. As design theorist Tony Fry has observed, seen from a design-centric perspective, anthropocentric Being is the decisive point of creation and destruction. In our growing awareness of planetary limits, and the finitude of both our existence and that which sustains us, the dynamic and ever present relationship between creation and destruction is becoming more obvious. Every creative act is a moment of choice that either creates or negates (de-futures). And, this is not to say that the principles of creation and destruction are black and white or clearcut. The existential polarity of creation and destruction is full of paradox because the meanings and functions of creation-destruction within a given context determine ethical, material and relational value or negative value. In their book The Upcycle, William McDonough and Michael Braungart discuss alternatives to this conventional vicious cycle of entropic devaluation. Likewise, in his book Upsizing, Gunter Pauli suggests ways that we can shift from an understanding of resources as “standing reserve” to earthly resources as productive of generative value. That involves moving from a role of husbandry to one of cultivation.

The co-embeddedness of destructive and creative forces inherent in every designed artifact or process is seen in high-visibility, controversial examples such as the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, a large-scale disruptive approach to education in the developing world conceived by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT. Humanitarian design, like humanitarian aid, requires a high level of consciousness-in-action. Many of the critiques of the OLPC program were based in a deep appreciation of the ways in which the designed world in turn goes on to design our ways of being human indefinitely. Concerns were raised that the OLPC program and programs like it, in introducing late-modern interventions into traditional learning contexts introduce techno-evolutionary ontologies out of phase with local life conditions in developing and emerging countries where they are deployed. Concerns have been raised about the impact of these tempo-cultural dislocations, about the inevitable impact upon local cultures, and about the need for ethical frameworks for decision-making about disruptive interventions at this scale. Although concerns about risk are valid and true, they are also partial in the sense that they represent some but not all perspectives. Answers to crucial questions such as these rarely have clear cut answers. In the case of OLPC, the wide disparity between criticism and praise perhaps reveals more about how the project goals were messaged and received by various points of view that constitute the general public than the project per se. Because these factors are dynamically influential however, public criticism will continue to co-shape the outcomes of future iterations of this and other innovative programs.

Robert Oppenheimer’s famous quote from the Bhagavad-Gita (above) obtains in every mundane moment, not just the Trinity Test that led to the horrific instantiations in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seen from a design and engineering vantage point, anthropocentric being is the decisive lever of creation and destruction. Philosopher Thomas Kasulis’ states “humans are the uniquely disharmonious aspect of the universe” (in body, speech, mind) is echoed by design theorist Tony Fry in describing creation and destruction as co-arising phenomenon, mutually constituting one another in a ‘dialectic of sustainment’ wherein every act of creation enfolds destruction. In the dialectic of the sustainment creation and destruction co-arise and co-constitute one another - this is the challenge inherent in designing. Derrida’s deconstructionist approach was based in part on Heidegger’s neologism “Destruktion” both are concerned with the positive value of loosening the grip inherited ways of being and thinking. In order to be and become conscious designing in a fundamental sense, we have to reinhabit our primal relations with matter, energy and time. For conscious designers this will require conscious experiential participation in destruction-creation.

The existential polarity of creation-destruction infuses every aspect of life, taking many forms and patterns. Two common patterns for how this polarity shows up in designing are as an opportunity cost and as a purgative. Acts of creation inherently entail destruction, such as for example when an architect specifies the use of a particular resource such as oak, cork, or bamboo. Each particular resource can be assessed in terms of its renewability or non- renewability. When we creatively alter that resource —such as for example by harvesting a tree and converting it to lumber— we render it incapable of reproducing itself or sequestering carbon dioxide. That material is down cycled, entropy is increased, along with waste. Every material specification entails an opportunity cost meaning that in making choices we forfeit the making of other choices. For example, in choosing to use a given material for a certain purpose we render it unavailable for an alternate purpose. In general, large-scale industrial operations such as mining and lumbering decrease the range of choices (opportunities) afforded by our material resources. In this typical pattern, the creation pole of the creation-destruction polarity is foregrounded while the destructive impact is backgrounded — although still present.

The grand existential polarity of creation - destruction takes a second significant pattern as a cathartic or purgative, emancipatory energy. In this alternate pattern, emphasis is on the value of the destructive principle. Destruction is not only inherent to creation, but rather it is crucial to enabling the possibility of creation because redundant and obsolete structures may be destroyed in order to make way for what’s emerging. On the macro cosmic scale life-giving energy of the sun finds its way to to us through direct and indirect sources as it is opportunistically harnessed by matter and life. Along the way, it is harnessed, sequestered, scattered and dissipated in entropic (destructive) and negentropic (creative) cycles of order and disorder. The persistence of dialectical forces observable in open systems such as in this case economies, have been interpreted in sometimes contradictory ways by neo-Marxist and free market analysts. For example, the phenomenon of alternating cycles of creation and destruction of wealth in the context of market economies was coined “creative destruction” by free-market proponent and economist Joseph Schumpeter. The inscriptive forces of creation-destruction are not limited to front-end creative development of design concepts. On the contrary, existentially permeating all aspects of reality, creation-destruction is an immanent feature of designing ontology. Design philosopher and theorist Cameron Tonkinwise of Carnegie Mellon University, has elaborated extensively on the largely unthought and unenacted arenas of conscious designing for dematerialization, disappearance, decommissioning, and elimination. See “Design Away: Unmaking Things.” These are the emerging conscious designing niches of the future.

Unconscious designing resigns itself to the production of destructive entropy as a necessary consequence of creativity. Based on a view of reality drawn from the past and the myriad ways that modern forces of production have focused on the value of what is created while minimizing the destruction that is always the other side of the coin, from concrete material instantiation in the form of construction and building infrastructure waste streams, to intangible forms of organizational waste of human capital. Conscious designing on the other hand, engages a dialectical play of entropy and negentropy, making a practice of observing and investigating the paradoxical ways in which destruction can be a form of creation and likewise creation can be a form of destruction.

Although the dynamic existential polarity of creation and destruction is inherent as life and death, we can develop a different relationship to this creative and destructive cycle with which we are always dancing. We can begin to see the beauty-ordinary-ness, and presence - absence, as inherent not only in explicit acts of creating something from nothing, but equally in acts of undoing, undesigning, and eradication. This inter-arising principle that conditions all the ways that we make and unmake worlds, leaves us open to a richer range of creative possibilities. <Absenting - Presencing>

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