January 21, 2021

Revealing

(Concealing)

“Way-making (dao) that can be put into words is not really way-making”

Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall

What if we could feel rising sea levels or taste the carbon in our atmosphere? Using instruments that extend the naked sensory reach of the human organism, we can understand the depths of the oceans, the seismic relations between tectonic plates of the earth and read the forensic traces of the Big Bang. This learning about the measurable exteriors of events and occasions, lends an orderly cause-and-effect narrative to what is an ultimately unknowably complex Mystery. When the data says groundwater is a source of life, what exactly does that mean? Although we are always interacting with our groundwater, that fact is hidden - not just physically and visually, but concealed from our awareness in the manner that interrelated climate phenomena are distant in time, space and scale. What if we could actually physically hear and feel the polyrhythmic beats of the living water that sustains our lives? Would sensing these [in]visible infrastructures in this expanded field change our relationship to them?

That’s what Public Works wants to find out. A transdisciplinary collaborative dedicated to creative civic engagement, Public Works was co-founded in 2013 by designer Kiersten Nash. Together with her colleagues—cellist, composer, and storyteller Ben Sollee; new media artist and engineer Sean Montgomery; d.j., designer, and educator Zachary Kaiser; public artist and designer, Bland Hoke; and creative consultant, Dan Marwit. Together, they imagined and are creating Livestream—“…an innovative participatory action research project that collects, monitors, and translates groundwater data from across Kentucky into an interactive soundscape that will manifest as a public art installation, an online archive, as well as an educational outreach program.” (Public Works)

Embracing the interpenetration of facts and values they ask “What if we could sense the water that runs beneath the Bluegrass?” Public Works aims for poiesis revealing the ebb and flow of complexities and contradictions that construct this vast infrastructure. In partnership with geologists Charles Taylor and Bart Davidson of the Kentucky Geological Survey, Public Works designed Livestream as a process for monitoring the health of Kentucky’s water table in real-time across a range of metrics in a long-term, three-phase (public art installation, online archive, educational outreach) science and civic engagement project that catalyzes conversations around on questions like “How much groundwater do we have? Is it enough? What aquifers are most sensitive to contamination? Why? How does this affect us? And, conversely, how do our everyday actions impact the quality of groundwater?” (Public Works)

A self-identified “thinker — tinkerer” Kiersten Nash integrates art, design and cultural theory with her background in athletic performance, in an investigation of what she calls [un]learning in service of expansion of individual and collective possibilities. A former distance runner and gymnast with a background in the fine arts and a passion for civic engagement, Nash groks the importance of movement and embodiment to adaptive learning. A core assumption of Public Works is that the practice of design must itself be transformed by design in order to confront to the challenges of today and tomorrow.  Public Works’ redirective practice (Fry) of [un]learning engages a learning - unlearning dialectic to enhance awareness of how citizens “affect and effect” or design (Nash) their surroundings.

Drawing on cultural and management theories, including single- and double-loop learning of action science (Argyris and Schön), Public Works embraces the reciprocal relationship between adaptive learning and change. In the Livestream project in particular, the culpabilities and capacities of [un]learning are explored through designed [dis]orientation—or “wayshowing” and “wayfinding” (Lynch, Mollerup)).  In brief, Public Works defines wayshowing and wayfinding as interrelated, albeit often [in]visible, design processes that privilege learning (wayshowing) and unlearning (wayfinding) . In this context, wayshowing is a single-loop mode of designing in which a variety of methods may be used to respond to a design brief, leaving the basic assumptions and core objectives of said brief intact, unquestioned (conventional design).  Wayfinding, on the other hand, is perceived as a double-loop approach to designing in which one or more tactics are used to interrogate and re-frame latent beliefs and biases embedded in our everyday, thereby liberating a range of new tactics and, ultimately, strategies (redirective design). By distinguishing between practices of design that tend to preserve the status quo, and practices of design that transform the status quo, Public Works is revealing ways that the disposition of the designer herself is crucial to what and how she learns, adapts, and contributes. Further, building upon the research of Mollerup, Public Works explores wayfinding and waylosing as markedly subjective design modes with the potential to redirect design praxis, while wayshowing is fundamental to intersubjective design communications.

Conscious redirective practices such as wayfinding and waylosing, (or double and triple- loop learning) (Torbert) can reveal nascent possibilities - what literary theorist Timothy Morton calls “escape routes, trap doors and utopias.” Designing is a process that hides conceals and reveals living cultural patterns and determines what is salient in the marketplace and in the society. The most aware designers are consciously working both with tangible (concrete) patterns such consumer products and services, as well as intangible (abstract) patterns such as values, emotions (Bowen) and ideologies. Because intangible cultural patterns cannot be empirically seen, tasted or measured they can be trickier to identify and to work with. As philosopher Thomas Kasulis puts it, culture ‘teaches’ gestalts. Kasulis describes the gestalt-teaching function of culture in terms of recursivities of patterns that structure thought and value. He characterizes these cultural patterns as having heuristic and predictive functions. Because design is such a ubiquitous form of culture, the designed world of artifacts determines what is foregrounded (revealed) and what is backgrounded (concealed). As Kasulis puts it, “Culture reiterates micro patterns into high levels of sophistication. Culture makes micro-patterned second nature.”

Designing can disclose ways of living more authentically. Although any kind of designing opens and closes worlds of possibility through selective concealing and revealing, the Livestream project highlights the second-order shift into an active inquiry—a mode of designing that characterizes wayfinding as a designing process model. By live streaming multiple sets of data points over an extended time, Public Works invites a diversity of publics to correlate or commune, differently. Experiencing real-time feedback from below the earth’s surface, individuals are asked to negotiate subjectivities across ecologies. Livestream is “…a reflection on the capacities and culpabilities of design to foster the literacies necessary to critically confront the present and enact alternative futures; yet it is also a call to action: to engage and disengage, learn and unlearn, to find one’s own way(s) of designing a more sustainable tomorrow, today.” (Public Works)

Designing reveals ways of worlding. (Trend) As design ethicist Philippe d’Anjou puts it, “…Sustainability is not any more something exterior to the design act and consciousness. It is instead an attitude that discloses the self, others and the world through the design of artifactual oriented projects such as buildings, cities, systems, objects etc.” Conventional design as wayshowing mostly conceals in order to reveal what the designer(s) deems salient. Postconventional design as wayfinding diverges into the unknown, revealing conscious and unconscious design scripts in need of reframing. This ‘double-loop designing’ or [un]learning in which the underlying assumptions and goals of a brief are critically confronted, is an essential capacity of a conscious design practice. Wayfinding in the form of un-learning, un-concealment and un-camouflage of latent possibilities that surround us, is essential to conscious designing. Reading this I hope you will grok how knowing, being and becoming show up in your own ways of navigation between wayshowing communications and wayfinding explorations.

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