January 21, 2021

Enforming

(Forming)

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us”. — Marshall Mc Luhan

In The Human Age, Diane Ackerman considers the consequences and displacements brought about by human engineering and design agency. In a discussion of displacement in the context of extraction industries, skyscrapers and megacities can be seen as displaced mines and quarries. On the material level and political level, cities can be seen as collective decisions about the allocation of planetary resources. Ackerman refers us to the sublime panoramic photographic vistas of artist Eduard Burtinski as “subliminal activism” because they inquire about our collective societal choices by means of poetics —through beauty, majesty, and the grandeur of the sublime. Coming from a post postmodern place, they hold the tension of opposites inherent in the clash between modernity and post modernity.

Older than language and taking form as artifacture, design is the unceasing inter-transformation of the physiosphere, biosphere and semiosphere. As a pattern and process language that conceal and reveal patterns, design and architecture disclose the world of artifacts as contingent. The tools and processes over which we have choice, as well as their situated and multivalent consequences show us that civilization is not solid but fluid —things can be otherwise. In the words of object oriented philosopher Levi Bryant, “Architecture does not merely express in the sense that those calling themselves historical materialists treat cultural artifacts as crystalized or coagulated expressions of their time; no, architecture forms and invents forms of life in its exploration of matter and the void.” <Creating - Destroying>

Designing agency is multivalent: We are the designer, the designing and the designed. Yet, being born into and socialized within worlds, we ‘forget’ that as co-authors, citizens and co-participants we made the world. Whether in the guise of city planning, technological interfaces or process models, designs tetra-arise in situated reciprocity with historical, interpersonal, experiential, economic and behavioral circumstances. The complex autopoeitics governing how things come into being remains ultimately, a Mystery. On the level of artifacts however, designed artifacts are patterns of structures that index collective consciousness - in particular our shared agreements and cherished debates. This concrete yet illusory “demi-reality” (Bhaskar) - the level of reality characterized by suffering, conflict and disharmony -is an ontic space of maintenance of the status quo - not a space of possibility.

The designed world is shaped by and in turn shapes us. Our lifestyle decisions and behaviors leave traces that become normative -inscriptive of future behaviors. In Ecology Without Nature, literary theorist Timothy Morton describes the built world and its artifacts of human designing as the past rendered solid as aesthetic form. Design histories are stacked layers, accretions of human evolutionary manifestation. Slicing diagonally through the layers reveals that each epoch aggregates knowing and know-how. This discloses complex interdependencies and mutual causalities that may not have been apparent before. This is to say that humans have been propositioning and collaborating with other life forms all along. Integral pundit Jeff Salzman, reflecting the the mutual co-arising of phenomena in all quadrants of experience, remarked that racial integration occurred first in exterior dimension, (in the form of laws and amendments), followed by the interior dimension (culture, values, ideals, etc.) The emergence and distribution of equity and justice require an evolved middle class context, such as that of a democracy.

Human artifice functions as phenotype, having characteristics and effects that accrue over time and are shaped by and in turn shape us. Designing is agential. Ontological designing is a model describing the circular and mutually causal relations between entities. In “Ontological Designing — laying the ground” Anne-Marie Willis describes the designing of the world from a hermeneutical perspective. The ontological designing model adds multivalence to dominant mental models of designing oriented toward cause and effect or linear throughputs within closed materials and production economies. This model has some affinity with Taoist and Buddhist cosmologies of mutual co-arising of phenomena. Willis’ essay synthesizes key ideas of her work with design theorist Tony Fry her co-founder in the Eco-Design Foundation and the peer-reviewed journal Design Philosophy Papers, aiming to position design as a world-shaping force demanding critical engagement by a diversity of disciplines. In Ontological Designing Willis hails designers calling them to understand that “every designed act carries on designing indefinitely.” Just as we, as designers, have been designed (shaped) by our societies and institutions, the artifacts that we design go on designing our world long after our part is done.

The role of design in creating our ubiquitous material worlds gives it a powerful and pervasive impact on our consciousness, attitudes and lifestyles. Ontological designing describes the reciprocal nature of the relationship between consciousness and environment, and the unceasing and evolutionarily adaptive character of culture. Because our consciousness is shaped by and in turn shapes our apperception of the multiplicity we call reality, we render experience through the filters of our anthropocentric becoming. Our anthropocentric disposition is thereby intimately related to significant human achievement and catastrophic harm.

Conscious designing is both prudent and agentic - destroying our inheritance to make space for what wants to emerge. Understanding our world as an evolving propositional space allows us to more fully inhabit our roles as designers in bringing forth opportunities to choose good and just futures, time after time. Design educator Jon Kolko explains, “…I’ve come to see that the most successful of our students have a worldview shift during our program, an entire change in their demeanor towards the built world around them. They come to see rules as malleable, power structures as changeable, and culture as embodied. They see design as a vehicle for slow but influential behavior change, and they recognize that over time, this behavior change impacts the landscape of the world. Over the course of the program, they see that they can design things (products, services, interactions, and policies), and these things cause the world to change.” (Kolko)

The built environment is a bridge between our societal inheritance and our legacy. Everyone has a practical and ethical stake in the affordances that structure and limit the built world now and of the future. Because it is everywhere embedded in our world, design situates the transformations of our tangible and intangible infrastructures that are crucial to any shift from “existing to preferred conditions” (Simon). In reading this I hope you get a felt sense of the radical plasticity of our world. As designers, it’s easy to forget that the map is not the territory. Yet the motile flux of phenomena that the term ontological designing names just is. It is the fluid territory prior to the map. For everyone - but especially for designers, architects and other creative professionals - we are engaged in the unceasing’s process of making, unmaking and remaking of our world whether we are aware of it or not. Another way of saying this is that powerlessness is learned and helplessness is a choice. We have a profound opportunity step out of complacency, to see the future as negotiable, and to see the past as a matter of joint responsibility because “…everything we are designing is designing us back.” (Silva) See philosopher and media artist Jason Silva’s juicy riff on ontological designing here.

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