Design can be seen as a practice that deals with other practices. Designing always happens within an existing situation or context, there is always an existing field the designer enters. Developing an understanding of how things are currently being done is crucial. Especially in situations of exploration (developing new insights on something) or problematic situations, the designer investigates the existing context and the different practices that inhabit it.
Design opportunities arise in these overlappings and clashes of practices. Sometimes there is contestation or conflict to be resolved, sometimes there are blindspots to be identified, whichever the case there is always a variety of frames at play. Designers use different strategies to identify and/or RE-frame them.
In RE-source the designers investigate flows of residual material by looking at how these flows ‘take place’. In doing so these different framings and practices come to light. Jos Klarenbeek investigated the concrete pavement stone (BSS) and interfaced the practice of the road workers with that of the tapestry weaver, resulting in a different system and different practice. Thom Bindels investigated the silt flow and blended the practices of dredging and soil production with those of architecture and biology.
The way we act, talk, and think about things matters a great deal in how these things manifest, or get enacted, in the world. Things aren’t a certain way by nature. Investigating how things get practiced opens up possibilities for RE-design.
“Realities are not explained by practices and beliefs but are instead produced in them. They are produced, and have a life, in relations. So what we need is ethnography or what Mol calls praxiography:
‘after the shift from an epistemological to a praxiographic appreciation of reality, telling about what [something] is, isn’t quite what it used to be. For somewhere along the way the meaning of the word ‘is’ has changed. Dramatically. This is what the change implies: the new ‘is’ is one that is situated. It doesn’t say what [something] is by nature, everywhere. It doesn’t say what it is in and of itself, for nothing ever ‘is’ alone. To be is to be related. The new talk about what is, does not bracket the practicalities involved in enacting reality. It keeps them present.’ (2002, 53–54)
A praxiography allows us to investigate the uncertain and complex lives of objects in a world where there is no closure.” (John Law 2004 p.59)