January 21, 2021

Situating

(Cutting)

“If it’s not ethical it cannot be beautiful” Yves Behar  

As human beings, we are profoundly embedded in relations. In fact the ways in which we respond to our environment moment-to-moment in body, speech, mind, and action constitutes a multivalent web of feedback that unfolds as an experientially lived ethics. Architecture, design and planning, due to their pervasive situatedness, mediate the ethical fabric of all our relations. In this sense, according the design theorist Clive Dilnot, the designed world can be seen as a situated ethics of configuration, distribution and mediation. Moreover, it is through designed mediations that our ethics are enacted. “Since situations are irredeemably bound to the human, then activities that engage actively with them — as design and politics do as essential moments of their acting, the situation as the very nexus of their work — are necessarily ethical …The onset of the artificial as world is the condition where this responsibility can no longer be so easily sloughed off. A politics adequate to the condition of the artificial as world begins here.” (Dilnot) <Encountering - Transacting>

The designed world is a tangible demonstration of what we collectively valued in the past. As our collective values evolve and change, existing structures and artifacts may not facilitate spontaneous ethical know-how (Varela). It’s crucial for designers to understand how structures can limit and liberate because the present moment is where the ethical action is. In Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, theoretical physicist and theorist Karen Barad describes the ethical situatedness at the very heart of reality as quantum entanglement. In her Agential Realism, objective phenomena are how space and time perform fluid identities on the quantum level. In their quantum “intra-action”, past present and future are dynamically enfolded in the becoming of matter. Cause-and-effects lose their explanatory power. She describes how our actions and choices - which she refers to as the “cutting together/apart” of space-time - simultaneously closes and opens possibilities as the enactment of our ethics. Ethical responsibility thus emerges from within complex and multiple ontologies, assemblages and entanglements. “ Quantum ethics” is Barad’s term for individual accountability for the “cuts” one makes. Quantum entanglements are irreducible relations of obligation and commitment that require what she calls the “constant iterative reworking of impossibility” by means of connection-making or what she calls “ cutting together/apart.”

One of the many gifts of postmodernity was the impulse toward reintegration of the axiological dimension of reality. Integral theory stresses that the meta-values Goodness, Truth and Beauty denote irreducible domains of reality. These three domains are internally consistent with respect to their truth claims and their methods. By beauty I refer to the realms of aesthetics and sensory experience, including interpretation and semiotics, Goodness refers to the dimensions of ethics and justice, agreements and freedoms, while Truth refers to that which can be validated and measured empirically as characteristics, efficacies, and impacts and reproduced.

Elemental values are attractors that orient but do not determine, futures. According to Integral philosopher Steve McIntosh in his book Evolution’s Purpose, meta-values function as strange attractors, allowing the possibility but not the necessity of patterned alignment over incoherence. Macintosh uses the term “values gravity” to describe the inalienable pull of the meta-values of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness as organizing principles of evolution. The values gravity of a society is mirrored in what we collectively desire or find titillating; what we choose, and what we most fear and retaliate against. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness are meta-principles that may be identified with as extrinsic values — relative, conditioned by many factors, and enacted in myriad diverse ways. The entire spectrum of transcendent and immanent values is necessary to fully address the causal, subtle and gross nature of reality. 

Getting clear on what we hold dear as human beings and as designers is key to building a conscious design practice. By aligning our design decision-making with our personal values, we harness the passion that gives meaning to our conscious designing efforts, throughout the challenging and rewarding phases that are the inevitable ups and downs of any creative practice. As organizing meta-principles, our values serve as strange attractors that have a decisive influence on how we live, work and serve. Intrinsic values are meta-principles that underlie our motivations to participate, contribute and thrive. Extrinsic values are the means and ways in which our intrinsic values find unique expression in via tangible and material demonstrations. In his paper, “MetaReality and the Dynamic Calling of the Good” philosopher Michael Schwartz explores the interrelatedness of phenomenal and transcendental spheres in describing Freedom, Responsibility, and Justice as a spectrum of ways that the transcendental good calls us to ethical action relative to our individual situated perspective. Thus freedom he describes as the face of the good from the first person perspective; responsibility is the arising of the good from the second person perspective; and justice is the superordinate form of goodness from the third person perspective. ​Describing these “values chords” Schwartz further proposes that depending on one’s situated perspective, a particular form of value; freedom, responsibility or justice will be like a top note or an orientation around which the others resonate. Our point of view dynamically mediates our meaning making - the why, what and how we are being called to create and instantiate in any given situation.

Due to this pervasive situated-ness, design is being challenged to tackle ever greater ethical complexity and significance. Culturally-driven value-centric design is coming to the forefront in the marketplace as consumers become increasingly conscious of the significance of their every day choices and consequences. This requires designers to develop and maintain a distinctive point of view that is resonant and influential. This means moving beyond form driven strategies and superficial value propositions. As the global success of American Apparel indicates, young consumers want much more than cool trendy apparel. If and when they shop they want to know that their purchase was produced inside of fair labor agreements that enact the mission of American Apparel — to make dignity of human labor the active choice and the public conversation that it deserves to be. Conscious design thus moves well beyond being “cool”

Seeking to appropriately re-situate design education within the sphere of practical philosophy, design philosopher Philippe d’Anjou expresses it this way, “… Designers are involved in the shaping of both humans and the world through the making of the artificial world and vice versa;… setting a design problem and project and bringing it into existence through design is a matter of ethics, not only techne, for designing an artificial environment, such as buildings and cities, is acting in the field of ethics, not of building alone.”

Conscious designing refuses to choose between Goodness, Truth and Beauty. As creatives, we have a crucial role in Habermas’ still unfinished Modern project of producing the conditions for truth, truthfulness, goodness in our world. Remaining agile around these distinctions is of the utmost importance for designers. Because design at its very most fundamental level affords use value, we can embrace the utilitarian ethic restated by integral theory as the basic moral imperative; “ the greatest good for greatest span” (Wilber). The basic moral imperatives functions as a kind of ecology of care and concern. How do you hear the elemental calling of the good as a call for your ethical design action?

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