“Instead of simply doing what one is supposed to do, one can inquire about reasons and protocols. Practitioners in exile are individuals who do not represent the consensus of the foreign practice, but who have doubts about it on rational, moral, and political grounds. Questioning long-established agreements and consent, these outsiders can represent and work toward a cause, which might otherwise be difficult for those entangled in the forcefields, power relations, and political relations of the context that the pariah enters.” (Miessen 2010)
Design as a ‘making’ or productive practice can also be understood as an interventional practice. Designers move into situations to investigate, they think through making and bring things into the world, into a world that is in flow. How should we understand the notion of ‘situations’ and how does it relate to the idea of flow?
What is seen in a situation depends on who is looking and how that looking is being done. Depending on the skills and experience of the practitioner different lines of the meshwork, different parts of the flow start to vibrate and move into visibility, into the designer’s view. When a designer is confronted with an objective, a question, a material, a place, thing or system, they wonder what it is ‘in the world’, how it is manifested. To answer this question designers engage in sense-making work, framing. They both engage with it reflectively and by adopting a first person perspective.
Designers investigate how their object of interest (whether a material, system or anything in between) is being framed by visiting places, talking to people: observing situations. Moreover, they themselves engage in framing during this process by seeing one thing as another. For instance, Thom Bindels visited a silt depot in the early stages of his research and looked at the silt as fertile soil in drying . He looked at the vegetation on the silt depots as drying tools. Ester looked at the silt depot as a potential public space , she saw fences and gates, movement and circulation, an area that afforded many activities. Thom’s ‘seeing as soil in drying’ and ‘plants as drying tools’, led him to further his research into the possibilities of the silt depot by talking to ecologists and developing a material that aided drying by using the available plants. The answer to the question of ‘what seems to be the situation’ is dependent on the skills and experience of the designer. In the meeting point of the skilled practitioner and a situation different affordances, possibilities for action (what the environment offers), emerge. The skills and experiences of the designer guide the sense-making work (naming, categorizing etc.) which in turn allows for a ‘seeing as’.
What something is in the world is being investigated by adopting the first person perspective and by making sense of the circumstances one finds oneself in. This is both an iterative process and a following. It is a following of where the emergent flow is heading you or heading with you. The possibilities for action reveal themselves in a meeting point of skilled practitioner and thing in the world, or situated thing. By being there the designer produces his/her own wave to surf on, so to speak, together with the world. Taken this way, design is a highly productive practice. By being reflective, the exploration and investigation of the present leads to imagining (and making manifest) a new possible. Being aware of the various ways of framing makes the process of reframing possible.
Based on our initial review of the designers and their working method in our matrix-tool, we can start to reflect on how each designer looked at a given situation and was framing it. It helps us to begin to reflect on their way of answering the question ‘what seems to be the situation’ and how that shaped their work. Depending on how we look at things, how we apprehend them and in which world we regard them in, we perceive them differently, we act differently and see different possibilities.
Take the following example. An ecologist looks at a tree, and what does he see? It sounds like the premise of a mildly funny joke at best, but it is a good starting point for a short design discussion. As designers look at things with a design perspective, the ecologist does so with her own and so does the chemist or the novelist. The chemist, ecologist, designer etc. are all part of specific practices. They are skilled and experienced within a certain domain of practice and name, categorize and therefor see the world around them a certain way. They are making sense of the world through that practice. Within each practice there is of course both variation and overlap. Although all are active in the design practice, each designer has their own specific perspective (system, place, thing, matter) and all skills and experience play into how they make sense of the world. By reframing residual materials the designers in the RE-source project engage with these practices reflectively and open up the assemblages of entangled practices they come across, and present new possibilities; how things could be otherwise.
The notion of meshwork is used to describe the moving interconnectedness of the world and how the world presents itself to us when we act. When we act we are always inevitably confronted with the complexity of the world, the stuff that seems as collateral to our intentions and expectations. The designers in RE-source not only experience this but try to use it productively. They try to reflect on what is going on and think about the possibilities that this brings. This thinking is in turn done by acting and reflecting, by making and observing or intervening.
Additionally, the notion of the meshwork reminds us of our being enmeshed, entangled, with the world. Better yet, it reminds us that there is not a clear distinction between ‘world’ and me. The absence of a clear boundary or distinction between the world and myself can be rationalized through biology and chemistry (we are in constant (ex)change, growth and decay together with bacteria and other organisms) but more importantly, its consequences can be understood empirically.
The things of the world, people, cars, trees, mountains, all kinds of objects and organisms, are not ON the world, isolated and distinct but they are the world. They are all tangled up in a mesh. Better yet, they are alive as Tim Ingold notes in his seminal text ‘Bringing Things to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials’. They are alive as exemplified by what I previously referred to as the collateral action we are confronted with when we act in the world. Everywhere things are leaking into each other. Things are a lot less clear than we sometimes make them out to be, and thankfully so. In this messiness we find movement, life and possibility.
This meshworked world that we are a part of is difficult to understand through notions of permanence and definite descriptions. While the trained ecologist might see the tree outside the window as a coming together of soil, water and light, as a coming together of bark, insects, root molds, shade and birds, and as enmeshed with other trees, the paved road next to it and the wind sweeping through the narrow between the two buildings on either side of the tree, someone else might see something different altogether. The real estate agent might see the tree as held in place by legislation and permits, he might see a dot on a map and an increase in value for the buildings next to it, an extra zero on a piece of paper, or a possible hazard to the structural integrity of those very same buildings next to it. So what is the tree?
Depending on who is doing the looking, different ‘tree’ show themselves. Depending on how we look at things, how we apprehend them, in which world we regard them in, we perceive them differently, we act differently and see different possibilities. What gets revealed, or established in view through the meeting of the specific thing and the skilled practitioner, is a certain situation. Several elements get related to each other in what can only be described as a specific situation. As mentioned before, our skills and experience shape our way of looking at something and shape our way of acting. With that in mind, what might the skills be that a designer in a more circular future would need and how should we educate them accordingly?
“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.’ 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)
Law, J. (2004) After Method: Mess in social science research. New York: Routledge.
Miessen, M. (2010) Nightmare of Participation: Crossbench practice as a mode of criticality. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
