In the Re-Source project materials play an important role, as residual material flows in and through a city but also in the way we understand the design practice. In its core, this has to do with a metaphysics different from classically understood scientific research. It is in the words of the Modernist writer Robert Musil the difference between developing a sense of reality and developing a sense of possibility. It is a step away from a positivist notion of an objective reality that can be studied, towards a constructionist notion of enactment of realities through practice.
Let’s focus for a moment on the overlap of reframing and participation in what we might call a ‘design situation’. Who and what participates in the gathering of people and things that makes up a certain situation? What in Actor Network Theory has been called the hinterland of practice is closely related to what in design has been called ‘frame’. Donald Schon used it in the 1980’s to describe the changing role of professionals and the design practice, and more recently Design Researcher Kees Dorst uses the notion of reframing as a way to talk about the value of designerly ways of acting in for instance doing research or in business. In Actor-Network-Theory the idea has been developed that different practices enact different realities through and by the construction of a ‘hinterland’, where a hinterland can be seen as the collection of protocols, tools used, ways of doing, practitioners, buildings, institutions etc. that help stabilize that particular practice. This ensures a specific reality to be enacted. Or from the Design perspective, a specific frame that gets adopted by the practitioner that helps perform a certain reality.
The act of RE-framing can be seen as a core activity of Design. We see Design as focused not on developing just a sense of reality but on developing a sense of possibility, by adopting a reflective stance that allows for an understanding of how things get enacted into being and how it could be otherwise. It is based on engaging with the materials of the situation. Design is not research or inquiry into things to describe an objective reality as it is, but it is to understand and think through making from an understanding of reality as something in process, enacted through and by ‘the materials of the situation’, to intervene and redirect the flow of things and create/make a new possibility.
In the conversations between me and Ester van de Wiel, the writings of Tim Ingold have helped to develop a common understanding and language about this. Ingold talks of artists but this can be extended to include designers.
“A work of art, I insist, is not an object but a thing […] the role of the artist is not to reproduce a preconceived idea, novel or not, but to join with and follow the forces and flows of material that bring the form of the work into being.” (Ingold 2010 p.10)
In following this reasoning of design along constructionist lines, we can regard the design practice as concerned with ‘situations’ as opposed to pure rational-problem-solving. Or as in Actor-Network-Theory, as concerned with the gatherings and knots of the world. This is what makes engaging a problem in a designerly way more a project and process than a solution. The reflective conversation with the materials of the situation, as Donald Schön calls it, or (re)framing as Kees Dorst refers to it, is one of such ways to conceptualize the core of the design practice. What are these ‘materials of the situation’, and what does such a conversation look like?
Donald Schön uses a same type of terminology as Ingold does when he talks about the design practice and states:
“He shapes the situation, in accordance with his initial appreciation of it, the situation “talks back,” and he responds to the situation’s back-talk. In a good process of design, this conversation with the situation is reflective. In answer to the situation’s back-talk, the designer reflects-in-action on the construction of the problem, the strategies of action, or the model of the phenomena, which have been implicit in his moves.”
(Schön 1983 p79.)
“In a practitioner’s reflective conversation with a situation that he treats as unique and uncertain, he functions as an agent/experient. Through his transaction with the situation, he shapes it and makes himself a part of it. Hence, the sense he makes of the situation must include his own contribution to it. Yet he recognizes that the situation, having a life of its own distinct from his intentions, may foil his projects and reveal new meanings.”
(Schön 1983 p163.)
The act of RE-framing, of entering a reflective conversation with the materials of the situation is to free them, people/things/materials, from supposed objectivity and a presumed fixed state, it is to redirect the flows and forces of a situation. Design in this sense is geared towards possibility, improvisational. Not random, but very much based on the tacit and embodied knowledge and experience of the Design professional that engages in reflection-in-action in a reflective conversation with the situation.
In the RE-Source project we try to not only investigate and RE-frame residual materials, but also investigate and learn about this almost intuitive process of reflection and knowledge generation. To make shareable the tacit and embodied knowledge that emerges through the experience in the design situation. We investigate the process of reflection in action but also try to allow for reflection on action and practice. Additionally, if we think of design as a practice that asks for a joining of the situation, as a practice that deals with highly unique and complex situations by intervening, what does that mean for design education and the academy as an institute? Is its current set up workable? What can the humanities take from and give to this way of doing research? There are, in short, many things going on simultaneously.