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Abstract
This paper is an analytically orientated attempt to reshape understanding of the connections of theory (in the wide sense) and design. It does so by building on Habermas’ double reconstruction of the interrelation of knowledge and human interests and the necessity of reflection in order to show that today, even in limited ways, design is a necessary form of theoretical, and not only practical, reflection. The underlying premise here is that in an epoch of the artificial, design is objectively situated to offer a distinctive mode of thinking concerning how we contend with the world as now is, i.e. the world we have made.
Notes
An earlier version of this paper was first given as a plenary talk to Wonderground, the conference of the Design Research Society, Lisbon, November 4th 2006.
1. Jürgen Habermas (Citation1971) Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy Schapiro. He described his aim as ‘I am undertaking a historically oriented attempt to reconstruct the prehistory of modern positivism with the systematic intention of analyzing the connections of knowledge and human interests. In following the process of the dissolution of epistemology which has left the philosophy of science in its place, one makes one's way over abandoned stages of reflection. Retreading this path from a perspective that looks back towards the point of departure may help to recover the forgotten experience of reflection. That we disavow reflection is positivism.’ (vii).
2. To give a deliberately emotive and psychological definition: 'A unique characteristic of what defines us as human beings on a par with literature and music' ... 'We have in the history of design an astonishingly rich inheritance. What is even more amazing is that with every new-born child the latent potential for similar achievement exists in this incredibly fertile human capability. It is the greatest renewable resource we possess and to acknowledge its creative potential could be the finest legacy we leave for our children and grandchildren.' The words come from the end of the historian John Heskett's unpublished manuscript Craft, Commerce, Industry. Without over-valuing ‘Design’ (itself a fetishistic displacement of what Heskett is referring to here), one challenge to theory is to articulate this capability as a crucial moment – and perhaps for us in the 21st century the crucial moment – of human praxis. it is precisely the seclusion of this capacity at a developed professional level within the design professions that forces its effective marginalization as a moment of action and that thus allows the substitution of unsustainable objectivating technological and economic rationality – and with it the squeezing of the 'conduct of life into the behavioral system of instrumental action' (Habermas Citation1971, 316). At the same time, to comprehend the psychology of design in the context of the artificial (which is today the minimum condition of thought) it is necessary to explode the nominal singular capacity ‘design’ to understand the shifting range of capacities and capabilities drawn upon in design action.
3. For the traditional (Platonic) relation here see Habermas Citation1971, 302.
4. This is the premise of Martin Heidegger (Citation[1938] 1977) in ‘Age of the World Picture’ [1938] in The Question of Technology and Other Essays.
5. This is precisely why philosophy throws up its hands at design: its impurity and inconstancy, the inability to separate what-is from entanglement with crude interest; the fact that in the end design is only a matter of negotiation (but this ‘only’ is precisely the question) terrifies thought.
6. Heidegger (Citation[1938] 1977) gives the logic of why this must be so. See especially the comments on the methodological construction of a ‘fixed ground plan of objects.’
7. Though it is interesting that the onset of the digital both in the world as a whole and in academic study is beginning to compel a change in this position. To 'read and critique' add (to a degree) 'build and make.' Yet even this development is in tension with how the social sciences are capable and incapable of dealing with things. anthropology and sociology will both claim to deal with the everyday, and even with material culture. Yet they do so as descriptive givens. What is absent is what is inescapable for the 'movement' of design thinking and practice, namely the sense that things-could-be-other. Whereas for the social sciences contingency is simply a fact of circumstance, for design it is always a moment. For this reason, the social sciences cannot see the configuration of things as the agency of difference. Condemned to description, the thought that things-could-be-other terrifies. In counter, design, ever irresponsible to the given, too easily reduces the thing to its configurative possibility; makes of its contingency the occasion for a moment of display. Both architecture and fashion, in their different-though-similar ways, demonstrate this, architecture with the greater irresponsibility.
8. There is no evading this point. Recent attempts at the ‘post-human’ do not in any way escape this requirement. Design cannot be other than anthropocentric. This does not mean, however, that one accedes to given definitions or demarcations of the ‘human.’
9. The interest most obviously obviated in almost all theories and models of design is the economic. Almost the entirety of design thought evades this question (save as valuing it as ‘business’ or ‘innovation’).
10. As I note in more detail in section V, design is both impure and outside these frameworks of ‘knowing’ the world. In respect of 'technical control,’ design is usurped by technology (hence thought’s contemporary capitulation to the digital); in respect of ethics design is usurped by ‘rights’ (since the materialization of ethics has almost no place in contemporary ethical discourse); in respect of language and the ‘expressive’ arts, the authority of literature, the humanities and art usurps the poetics of making.
11. This phrase comes in ‘Philosophy and Psychoanalysis,’ an essay by Badiou Citation2005. He is formulating an understanding of how a practice constitutes a form of thinking. 'I call thinking the non-dialectical or inseparable unity of a theory and a practice. To understand such a unity the simplest case is that of science; in physics there are theories, concepts and mathematical formulas and there are also technical apparatuses and experiments. But physics as a thinking does not separate the two. A text by Galileo or Einstein circulates between concepts, mathematics and experiments, and this circulation is the movement of a unique thinking’ Badiou Citation2005, 60.
12. This is exemplified in Glenn Parsons’ recent The Philosophy of Design (Citation2016), which is a philosophy of modernism in design, not thought concerning design.
13. This is why there can be no design theory that is not also a theory of history.
14. This immediately suggests the potential fertility of the concept of design as 'unique circulations of a thinking.' Design is neither unique per se, nor is it ‘all.’ It is the site of a unique circulation between its complex moments: a circulation that contains, by definition, the impure negotiation of circumstance and situation.
15. Design, as an agency of the artificial, is by definition a sphere of the possible. This does not mean merely variation in time and place along a single continuum (as retrospective histories couch it) but possibility without finite end and without predictability as to what might thereby by opened, both as configurative possibilities and in the deployment of capacities.
16. Artifice is without ontology in the traditional sense, i.e. it has no being outside of history, outside, that is, the forms it takes in any instance. We are faced then with grasping artifice in terms of the relations though which it is constituted and which, in turn, it helps constitute. The artificial is the construction of such relations. Design is the agency of the artificial in its capacity as mediation or ‘interface.’ It is through design that we understand the artificial.
17. There can of course be no projection of a fixed ground plan of objects in design.
18. Cf. Simon Citation1996, xi, 6. Although Simon determines mediation as ‘interface’ and ‘malleability by environment,’ or ‘meeting points,’ and speaks of ‘contingency’ rather than possibility, the point applies.
19. In the Platonic version: ‘When the philosopher views the immortal order, he cannot help bringing himself into accord with the proportions of the cosmos and reproducing them internally. He manifests these proportions, which he sees in the motions of nature and the harmonic series of music, within himself; he forms himself through mimesis. Through the soul's likening itself to the ordered motion of the cosmos, theory enters the conduct of life. In ethos theory molds life to its form and is reflected in the conduct of those who subject themselves to its discipline’ (Habermas Citation1971, 301).
20. In that this refusal causes practice to be formulated, pedagogically and in practice as ‘merely so’
21. I have very briefly sketched some moments of this in ‘Care as a problem: How to begin to create, for design, an adequate theory of care’ in Rodgers et al. Citation2017.
22. That design is itself its own criticism, and therefore its own self-comprehension of itself, is something that design theory has taken too little account of, most probably because of the historically low levels of critical dialogue around design and the incapacity of design theory in its current modes to deal, well, with designed things (using this term now in its broadest possible application).
23. Speculative critical design has built on this double understanding.
24. In relation to these moments, ontological theory served ‘as protection against regression to an earlier stage that had been surpassed. Had it been possible to detect that the identity of pure Being was an objectivistic illusion, ego identity would not have been able to take shape on its basis. The representation of interest appertained to this interest itself,’ Habermas Citation1971, 306–7.
25. This is today popularly described as the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is, however, merely a symptom of the deeper development of the onset of the artificial as constituting world (see Dilnot Citation2014, Citation2015).
26. Cf. Heidegger's line that 'The modern age requires … in order to be withstood in the future, in its essence and on the very strength of its essence, an originality and range of reflection for which we of today are perhaps preparing somewhat, but over which we certainly can never gain mastery (‘Age of the World Picture,’ 137). The obvious question posed by this statement is: in what way is design enabled to offer 'originality and range of reflection' vis-à-vis the emergent essence (and crises) of what now is
27. I am using the term ‘environmental’ in two different ways. First, it refers to the historical environment, meaning the unsustainability of what now-is (of the artificial world we have created). Second, I want to use it in the sense that Herbert Simon uses it in Sciences of the Artificial, where he opens chapter 3 on the psychology of thinking with a discussion of first ant and then human behavior, concluding this short section with the hypothesis that ‘A man, viewed as a behaving system, is quite simple, The apparent complexity of his behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which he finds himself’ (Simon Citation1996, 65).
28. That we laud the quasi-autonomy of (particularly) technological, medical-scientific and economic practices and thinking is both a symptom and structural moment of the modern world. Today, the costs of the autonomy of practices, their deliberate divorce from human interests that cannot be thought as internal to their operation, are beginning to be all-too evident.
29. We live with uncertainty, which is one reason why our mental horizons of capability have so drastically shrunk that we have become incapable of large-scale constructive action (though not of destructive actions: these retain their certainty and hence their appeal, at least for some).
30. Neither intellectual nor objective, this confinement of limits has as its purpose keeping speculation and extrapolation within the boundary of the ‘abstract principles of organization’ that secure and maintain system identity. In the modern case, these are the principles of capitalism, and beyond that of the technological and representational frameworks that secure and give identity to the ‘modern.’ A brief but valuable explanation of this point is available in Jürgen Habermas (Citation1973b) Legitimation Crisis.
31. On incommensurability, see Sargent (Citation1994).
32. There is no dispensing with technology. Desire alone proves this. As does need. The crucial condition is, as above, the establishment of a genuinely ‘free relationship to technology.’ In practice, this perhaps may be achieved by thinking through Walter Benjamin’s extraordinary insight from 1935 that ‘The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society’ (Benjamin Citation1969, 242). The term ‘free relationship to technology’ comes from Martin Heidegger’s essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1977). See also, in the same volume, the essay ‘The Turning.’ The notion is surprisingly undeveloped in the literature on this essay.
33. A project that was begun by Adorno and Horkheimer (Citation1997) Dialectic of Enlightenment [1944] but which today remains to be completed.
34. I am here quoting from Richard J. Bernstein’s (Citation1985) useful introduction to an extended debate on Habermas’ work, 1–32 and especially 8–11.
35. Being outside the frameworks of knowledge, design becomes invisible. Critical thought shields itself from the challenge it represents by placing it in a hierarchy that eschews it of consequence. More generally, since the field of making is invisible to thought, the significance of the act of (re-)configuring that which is made passes below consciousness. The splitting involved here is itself taken as a given. If changing circumstances are putting objective pressure on this older model, the latter survives as the underpinning of disciplinary identity.
36. With all the consequent distinctions in pedagogy that follow; thus, by the 1840s nowhere in the world are architects and civil engineers still being taught in the same programs.
37. The logic of specialization differentiation, especially developmentally, has been defended in depth (cf. Habermas Citation1984 Theory of Communicative Action). But it leaves out of consideration the modes of synthesis through which these realms are reintegrated in the social totality. This is another version of that knowledge deficit at the societal level that concerns the synthetic interaction of diverse knowledge and experience. In relation to the realms of the aesthetic, the technical and the ethical it is clear that design provides one of the few moments in which, as internal condition of its own configuration and disposition, these three modes are brought together in forms of synthesis, both in actuality, and as a moment of what we might call the ideal practice of design.
38. Simon Citation1996, 9.
39. From the side of design, Jamer Hunt (Citation2011) wittily comments on this condition.
40. Design does not (nor could it ever) of itself provide an integral model of the world-under-the-artificial. What, however, it does do as a minimum is that it calls into question the separation of modes of knowledge and acting on which the quasi-autonomy of wholly objectivated processes – instrumentalized science, most technologies, virtually all of economics; emerging techniques of data-management, surveillance, artificial intelligence; large sectors of the industrialized biological sciences – are based.
41. See note 11.
42. See note 26.
43. For the strongest statement of these see Heidegger Citation1973, especially 103–110.