January 21, 2021

Inter-Relating

(Dissociating)

 

“It takes two to speak the truth — one to speak, and another to hear.”

Henry David Thoreau

In her thoughtful and revealing essay at the intersection of design, ethics and interaction, “A ‘way of being’ in design; Zen and the art of being a human centered practitioner” (Design Philosophy Papers Issue #1 2012) Yoko Akama, Senior Lecturer in communication design in the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, describes a way of being reflective as a “ human centered” designer as well as a human being. This way of being reflective is not the application of the theory to the sphere of practice. Nor is it compliance with moral injunctions urging certain types of design practices, platforms or behaviors. This way of being reflective is closer to a disposition toward reality than a practice.

Yoko’s article puts forward two concerns, first, frustration with the fashionable call for designers’ engagements with ‘other’ client populations via social, humanitarian or user-centered design. Second, observations from the author’s standpoint as a human-centered design professional about her field and its ever more rote methodologies. She reframes these two concerns offering the possibility for a generous expansion of the meaning of ‘human-centered-ness’ and its ramifications for user-centered, social and/or humanitarian design .

Professor Thomas Kasulis, of the Center for the Study of Religion at The Ohio State University in his book, Intimacy Or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference discusses Western culture (acknowledging the broad generalization) as integrity-oriented and Asian cultures broadly as intimacy-oriented. He references Japanese Buddhism in describing human-being as process, as becoming. This resonates with Yoko Akama’s assertion that ‘this practice of practicing design in continuous reflection’ is a way-of-being as a process of evolution. Continuous reflection generates a both/and disposition tolerant of ambiguity. This flexibility of awareness has been valued by the wisdom traditions dating from the Axial Age. Yoko Akama compares the generalized Japanese and Western concepts of human being “Being human-centred is criticised for perpetuating an anthropocentric position[3] further contributing to humanity’s self-centredness and environmentally destructive behaviour. The profound ethical difference of conceiving humans as detached and in isolation, compared to the Japanese concept of human as relational in-betweennes, is argued by one of the most significant Japanese philosophers of the twentieth century, Tetsuro Watsuji”.

Drawing on a range of phenomenologies, in particular on Goethe’s phenomenological concept of Wholeness, Merleau-Ponty’s Embodied Perception and Watsuji’s ethical philosophy of Inter-Being, Akama describes how this reflective disposition toward reality is something that we participate in co-creating in real time with others (sentient and non-sentient entities). Reflective practice is the way of being that allows us to commune in the present moment, the decisive, potentiated space where creative and destructive intention originates. This We-space is the inter-subjective exchange where what Western culture calls ethics, is enacted relationally. Yoko demonstrates the modeling role of culture and the decisive impact of our mental models on what it means to be, do, and have in human ways. Language and culture make sense of and prioritize experience differently—they tell us what to notice. I would extend Yoko’s point to stress that the mechanism by which that happens is attention. Attention is what allows us to toggle in real time between the cognitive and sensing faculties of body-mind as the arising of the multiplicity we make “sense” of and call reality.

“Goethe maintained that a person’s inner recognition and perception is equally as important as their outer senses and intellect”. (Akama) Concurring with Goethe, that it’s not about reason or embodiment, but rather about reason and embodiment, the AQAL (all-quadrant, all-level) framework of Integral Theory describes all experience in terms of four quadrants that simultaneously arise. The tetra-arising of phenomena in the four quadrants: subjective, inter-subjective, objective and inter-objective, accounts for all domains of experience. Integral theory brings discernment to the faculties of sense, cognition, shared values and behaviors, and their respective truth claims, demonstrating their mutual irreducibility. Working within this AQAL framework we see the both/and supplant the either/or. Sensing/cognition and agency/union co-occur. Integral Theory sensitizes us to the presence of each experiential domain in every moment. Each domain is valid, yet partial. The partial truths of each domain together constitute an embodied yet reasoned grasp of reality.

Integral studies places significant emphasis on the We-space, its cultivation and extension by means of individual and collective interiors and exteriors. Integral Theory understands all phenomena as holons ; parts that are simultaneously wholes, compromising holarchies, nested orders of increasing depth and complexity. The levels in Integral Theory describe human growth and development as a key determinant of individual worldview and mental modeling. Yoko’s appeal for a richer interpretation of human-centered design as, ‘a lived, embodied experience in the in-between-ness of people and objects in the world’ rests on thinkers such at Watsuji, Dogen, and Merleau-Ponty, all of whom influenced and were influenced by Asian thought. They stress the situatedness of ethics in the relational space. It is in this mutual We-space in real time that values are actually produced and enacted. From this perspective it’s no wonder that in modern Western society our more dualistic cultural maps tend to describe ethics as an absence rather than a presence. We tend to use the word ‘ethical’ in multiple rhetorical ways in the context of design debates. Post-modernism rejects the rational positivist approach that eschews considerations of values altogether, substituting instead a relativistic stance that engenders values balkanization. In the normative assertion that design should be more ethical, the phrasing as an imperative as well as its mirror opposite, the implication that ethics is a ‘option’ that may be applied or not, miss the immanent, immersive quality of ethical relations. Ethics, as a quality of our interpersonal We-space, cannot be dis-embedded from design or any other interaction. Ethics names the nature and texture of the relational space and in this sense there is an ethical dimension to all our encounters with human and non-human life regardless of whether we are aware of it. The term ‘unethical’ refers not to the absence of ethics but to a lapse of ethical consciousness that results in a co-arising lack of inter-subjective mutuality.

The tremendous structuring challenges of our times can only be met by the equally immersive and fully engaged presence of human-being. The capacity to be in active reflection about the results and consequences of our designing activities is among the most crucial skills the designer will ever develop. A reflective designing orientation is essential to responding to the suffering of the world via design.

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