RELATED TERMS: Artifactuality and Actuvirtuality; Philosophy
“Our thoughts install us in a real fiction.” (Dubreuil, 2015: 75)
“Teaching philosophy in art school means devoting oneself to a method of a particular kind, given that the students’ main activity is not to practice philosophy but rather art or design.” (Dautrey, 2020)
Through the gradual complexification of the practices referred to under the banner of design, as discussed in Design: Incomplete Conjectures, design and research have become closely interwoven. In this context, design/research methodology has a more concrete side, that is, all the methods, media and means used to realise or materialise designs; and a more abstract side, which involves theories and philosophical assumptions of an ontological, epistemological and axiological character. From this perspective, design and philosophy are closely inter-related.
Aicher on Design and Philosophy
In responding to his own question of ‘What is design?’ in an essay first published in the early 1990s, Otl Aicher (2015: 78) considers that the discussion about design,
“comes down to the question of whether we can still allow ourselves the luxury of simply recognizing the world, rather than designing it. is our rationalistic culture of knowledge and our scientific morality of neutral objectivity not at an end, a point where annihilation of life is within the realms of the possible and can only be averted by a creative design intervention, a design in the dimension of what is feasible, of manufactured reality, not just of the insight in principle? design is no longer a shaping concept, it moves into the realms of philosophy, of explanations of the world and understanding of the times.”
Aicher (2015: 92) concludes, “philosophy and design are heading for the same point, philosophy in thinking, design in making. this point is that our world is in a condition of manufacturing itself. it is designed, it is made, we must see from use how good, how bad we are.”
If, as contended in Incomplete …, it is design (and not cybernetics) that lies at the ‘end of philosophy’, it inherits the problematique with which philosophy ends: its questioning of its own origins and end, beginnings and endings, means and ends, its finitude, its finite life, nevertheless its living on, its sur-vival; its questioning of its purpose, its telos; its questioning of its destiny-destination; and its questioning of what it ‘does’, its techne and its praxis. Philosophy lives on through design, by design.
As Tonkinwise (2014) makes clear, in reviewing Tony Fry’s book, Becoming Human By Design, an examination of design and designing provokes questions that can only be described as philosophical in character, questions that are central to an understanding of the world in the early 21st century. Those questions concern design and nature; design and humanity; and design and environment. All three questions are closely interwoven. They can be reduced to three slogans, arguments or rubrics: Design supplements; Design is Dasein; Design designs.
The first question concerns the relationship between the natural and the designed. Can the forms, patterns and processes found in nature be described as ‘designs’ and, if so, do these forms issue from a pre-existing design intelligence or, rather, are they emergent properties arising from repeated natural, iterated, evolutionary experimentation? In this context, does human designing supplement natural designing?
The issue of supplementarity brings to attention Derrida’s ‘logic of the supplement’ (Nancy, 2013). In this logic, the supplement, in the form of the artificial, the cultural or the technological, both adds to natural designs while at the same time supplanting such designs, such that they take their place. The supplement is both within nature, as arising from within it, and outside nature, as displacing it: a strange loop or entangled hierarchy, perhaps a heterarchy.
The logic of the supplement has implications for discussions of the relationship between design intelligence and natural intelligence. For example, the project of digitisation may be seen as the latest iteration of that natural-artificial supplementarity, another entanglement.
The second question concerns whether design is a defining constitutive human action. Can one say, for example, that to be human is to design and, conversely, that to design is to be human? In short, is Dasein design? This narrows the scope of the first question from all forms of inorganic and organic matter to the domain of the human existence. Herbert Simon, Victor Papanek and Ezio Manzini have all, in different ways, suggested that anyone engaged in the deliberate, intentional improvement in their situation can be thought of as a designer. Even so, Tonkinwise comments, designers rarely study why or how humans make, and plan their making, in the philosophical, anthropological or even psychological sense.
The third question returns to the relationship between the human and the natural, as each begins to provide the environment for the other in a logic of supplementarity, marking a reflexive and recursive relationship between the designed environment and the designing intelligence. In short, design designs. While designers may all have heard versions of Winston Churchill’s quote about the buildings that we shape in turn shaping us, Tonkinwise notes, the mechanisms by means of which these influences act are mostly limited to unexamined descriptions of affordances. The enactive perception and the distributed cognition that allows designs to be effective and affective forces on habitual activities in habitual places require closer examination. This is another approach to understanding how design acts within the concatenation of natural and artificial intelligences through cultural and bodily techniques and different inter-related orders of technology, from infrastructural technologies to technologies of the self.
These questions might be characterised as posing the question of how design, thoroughly imbricated with philosophical questions, has become a way of life, implicitly embracing philosophies of living well, philosophies of living and philosophies of being, as discussed by Takaki (2016). The situated decision-making this implies needs to be made more explicit to understand how design acts. This will enable designers (everyone?) to think and practice design at the scale of its consequences, and hence its responsibilities.
Incomplete … examines the role of design as poiesis (finite making, producing) as praxis (infinite doing, interacting) and as theoria (thinking, theorising); and questions design as practice, pedagogy, discourse, medium, technology, ‘thing’ and environment (‘system’, ‘frame’, ‘horizon’). In short, it questions ‘Design’, in the guise of ‘thought’ [‘design thinking’, ‘design philosophy’], as it seeks, somewhat presumptuously perhaps, to take up the mantle of ‘Metaphysics’, as ‘Philosophy’, ironically just at that point when, “[m]etaphysics at its end – and here it is phenomenology that says so – declares to itself its own noncompleteability as the end of its nonbeginning, of its properly nonassignable beginning, or (if you like) its in-auguration.”Nancy, 1997: 22)
For further discussion , go to [Of] Grammatography
If ‘design’ comes as the ‘end’ of philosophy, at the ‘end’ of philosophy as metaphysics, it does so as a completion and a step beyond itself, that is, as its incompletion…
Like Bjorn Franke (2016), the Incomplete … website regards design,
“as a material philosophy that explores and reflects philosophical issues by situating them in the concrete and particular reality of human life rather than in a generalised and abstract realm.”
In this way,
“the activity of designing is accordingly considered an exploration of philosophical questions that uses design objects both as media for conducting an inquiry and communicating its outcome.”
For Heidegger, in his later writings, the rapid technological development of the global north spells an end to philosophical thinking and to a properly authentic relationship to the world. ‘Cybernetic’ systems have replaced the traditional role of metaphysics, thereby usurping philosophy. Heidegger asserts that philosophy is metaphysics and metaphysics thinks beings as a whole, the world of beings in relation to Being, with respect to the belonging together of beings in Being. (LaRiviere, 2017: 129)
Heidegger considered that it was now cybernetics that thinks the totality. This raises questions about, for example, what has happened to philosophy in the half century since Heidegger announced its death knell? Can philosophy survive the complete digitisation of the world? Can metaphysics still have currency in an age of ubiquitous computation? (LaRiviere, 2017: 129)
The response to these questions in Incomplete … is that it is ‘design’, as artifactuality and actuvirtuality, that lies at the ‘end’ of philosophy, but neither in an apocalyptic sense nor in an eschatological (moralistic) sense, through which thinking continues or proceeds. Such design does not take place under the sign of cybernetics, as one approach among many for examining whole-part relationships, nor under the sign of digitisation, which again is one approach to the more general questions of discreteness and ‘computation’ as a metaphor for ‘thinking’.
‘Thinking’, henceforth, is ‘designing’, an activity that cannot, in turn, be reduced to ‘design thinking’ as a commercial, corporate practice of problem solving.
Design, thus, cannot simply be problem solving nor an operational activity producing artefacts and tools for instrumental use.
In the words of Franke (2016: 183), design can be viewed as philosophical inquiry in which designing is the mode of inquiry and design objects are the media for inquiry: “Design objects are … not illustrations of philosophical questions, concepts and ideas but the media for and the results of a philosophical inquiry.”
What this means is that rather than be seen solely in functional and teleological terms, that is, in terms of a pre-defined practical end within a pre-defined purpose, design objects should also be seen in terms of the openness or closure of their actions, that is, in terms of their (ethical, political, cultural, environmental, etc.) consequences: the material and conceptual worlds to which they give rise or could give rise. In this way, designing can be seen as critical and reflective, as a form of understanding and as a way of asking questions rather than simply presuming to solve problems.
Franke (2016: 183): “Design can be regarded as a philosophical inquiry when it problematises the everyday material and technological world. Thereby, design is not a matter of finding answers or solutions but a matter of questioning, problematising, visualising and materialising issues.”
Design is thus a mode of understanding through performative action and practical thought.
Given this approach, the aim of design, as philosophical inquiry, is not to envision or project a different world to be realised, but to develop means through which alternative worlds can be materialised for reflection and understanding; and the existing world can be seen differently.
This form of design, as philosophical inquiry, can perhaps be understood in terms of:
- showing the world in a different light, problematising everyday reality and, thereby, defamiliarising the world;
- a specific way of life and thus as experiencing philosophical problems first-hand; and
- an inquiry into and production of concepts and thus as invention of new possibilities for thinking and acting.
Henceforth, design is not only concerned with the production of material reality, but also with conceptual, ethical, political questions, as it examines the way people can, do and could (inter)act and think, i.e. ‘live’.
Whereas (traditionally) philosophy investigates these questions in an abstract and general sense (through speech and writing), design as philosophical inquiry can investigate these questions within the concrete, particular and everyday (multi-modal, multi-mediated) reality and can thus be considered as a material philosophy.
Designed entities are used to materialise different perspectives on human existence and on possible worlds. In this regard, they are arguments for or against a certain world — a certain way of acting or thinking — in the form of perspectives that an audience can adopt, reject, discuss or develop further.
To become perspectival, design entities need to be seen as media for reflection rather than objects for practical use, as they would otherwise disappear within the fabric of everyday life and the context of use.
Design objects make perspectives intersubjectively accessible. The knowledge created is thus the reflection on one’s experience while adopting or rejecting a perspective. The knowledge generated sits within the concrete and particular reality of everyday life [it is situated knowledge] and cannot entirely be abstracted, generalised or objectified.
A primary subject matter of design as philosophical inquiry are the mediating effects of ‘technology’, understood as the worlds and modes of existence created by design objects.
The objects of inquiry are thus not (so much) the artefacts themselves but rather their effects, that is, the interactions and experiences that they afford.
Consequently, the question of design as inquiry is not what kind of artefacts to produce, but what kind of humans and worlds are produced by artefacts in terms of experience, [emotion,] action and thought.
Design as philosophical inquiry investigates the possible interactions, worlds and ways of thinking that new artefacts and technologies may permit or cause [afford], whereby design objects (material artefacts and technologies) themselves are the media for this reflection.
As material thought experiments, fictional design objects make it possible to contextualise questions and to show perspectives on possible worlds. … Design objects are … embedded into the fabric of everyday reality and therefore can have more direct effects than similar dramatic hypothetical experiments in literature or film. They create a certain ambiguity as they are fictional objects entering into and intervening in the real world, that is, they are real fictions.
As thinking things, design objects are models that make it possible to understand something through use and to think about something through modelling. … models are mediating instruments, as they bring together different realms, such as the abstract and concrete, the general and the particular, theory and practice, or the scientific and the everyday world.
As staged situations, design objects create concrete and bodily first-hand experiences that can lead to new perspectives. When involved in a situation one is required to orient oneself and to make decisions about how to think about the situation and how to act in the situation. … these situations need to be staged so as not to be confused with reality.
Design objects used as media for inquiry, contemplation and understanding are tools for philosophical inquiry as they enable both the designer and the audience to see the world differently by adopting new perspectives through speculation (fictions), modelling and experience (situations).
These approaches are not interdependent but … can complement each other: situations are fictional whenever they divert from reality and are models if they allow one to see something else in them; fictions situate, in that they always create a concrete context for the exploration of philosophical issues.
[Aside on the analytical-continental philosophy distinction. The analytic tradition, stemming from Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s application of Frege’s thought on logic to philosophical questions, emphasises the actions of explaining, clarifying and providing causal reasons. It may therefore seem to be devoid of ethics and politics, although on closer inspection such questions can be drawn out from the implications of the methodological commitments. The continental tradition, emphasises understanding rather than explaining or providing causes. For that reason, it is cautious about applying the methods of the natural sciences, which emphasise causality, to philosophical problems. The continental tradition is therefore more conspicuously and explicitly concerned with social criticism.
It is to be noted that Immanuel Kant is part of both the analytical and the continental philosophical canons. One way of thinking about the relationship between the two traditions is to consider how they respond to the fundamental questions raised by Kant concerning what might be considered as genuine human knowledge; and which aspects of Kant’s extensive writings they highlight]
References
Aicher, O. (2015) Design and philosophy. In Analogous and digital. Berlin, DE: Ernst and Sohn, pp.75-92.
Dautrey, J. (2020) Artistic doing, confronted by philosophical saying: A subject for thought, or outside it?, Rue Descartes, 97(1), pp. 65–82. doi: 10.3917/rdes.097.0065.
Dubreuil, L. (2015) The Intellective space: Thinking beyond cognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Franke, B. (2016) Design as inquiry: prospects for a material philosophy. [PhD thesis]. Royal College of Art.
Fry, T. (2012) Becoming human by design. London, UK: Berg.
LaRiviere, J. (2017) Logic of digital worlds. [Review of] Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects (University of Minnesota Press, 2016)’, Parrhesia, 27, pp. 129–135.
Nancy, J.-L. (1997) The Sense of the world. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Nancy, J.-L. (2013) Of Struction, Parrhesia. Translated by T. Holloway and F. Méchain, (17), pp. 1–10.
Takaki, K. (2016) Living well, living, and being, Journal of Philosophy of Life, 6(3), pp. 59–73.
Tonkinwise, C. (2014) [Review of] Becoming Human by Design by Tony Fry, Design Issues, 30(2), pp. 118–120. doi: 10.1162/DESI_r_00269.
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