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Poiesis

RELATED TERMS: Philosophy; Praxis;

Poiesis is a Greek term that means making, producing, creation, creative power or ability. Poiesis is contrasted with praxis, which means ‘doing’ or ‘acting’, by Plato and Aristotle. Excellent making requires techne, skill, while excellent doing requires arete, virtue.

The question for design practices is whether the design process and the design outcome are modes of production or modes of action or, indeed, a mixture of both.

The Aristotelian distinction between poiesis and praxis is developed by Hannah Arendt, through a re-reading of Heidegger’s Being and Time, when she distinguishes among labour, work and action (or labour, work, action and thinking). For Arendt, labour simply reproduces the labourer and leaves no trace in the world; it is through work that the world is made and re-made in its material form; while it is through action that the political and the ethical dimensions of social existence are realised as spheres of human practice.

The important question to pose of a design is how it takes part in the work of (re-)making the world and how it acts ethically and politically (and upon whom or what)?

References

Arendt, H. (1998) The Human condition. 2nd edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Placemaking

RELATED TERMS: World-Building

Placemaking is about the collaboration between all elements which make the whole, coming to life through its use. It is our experience of place that gives it meaning. Placemaking is the art of creating public ‘places of the soul,’ that uplift and help us connect to each other; “making a Public Space a Living Space.”

According to Markusen and Gadwa (2010),

“In creative placemaking, partners from public, private, non-profit, and community sectors strategically shape the physical and social character of a neighborhood, town, city, or region around arts and cultural activities. Creative placemaking animates public and private spaces, rejuvenates structures and streetscapes, improves local business viability and public safety, and brings diverse people together to celebrate, inspire, and be inspired.”

References

Markusen, A. and Gadwa, A. (2010) Creative placemaking. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts. Available at: http://www.nea.gov/pub/CreativePlacemaking-Paper.pdf.

Place, Space, Placiality, Spatiality

RELATED TERMS: Body; Khora or Chora; Phenomenology; Time

Place

Places are events; they ‘take place’ over extended periods of time. Places are sensible, perceivable by the senses, and intelligible, existing in thought, in the imagination and in the memory. They also constitute a third order, khôra or chora, an interval between the sensible and the intelligible. Such an interval, it is contended, permits or enables designs to ‘take place’ as neither simply sensible nor intelligible, thus allowing for the in-vention, the in-coming of the other: a ‘being-with’, a sharing, rather than a self-contained or discrete ‘being’ or a self-possessed identity. That is to say, while designs are pre-conceived in terms of intention and telos, they may exceed that conception, potentially opening to (a new, radical) inception in the ways in which they continue to act and be acted upon in the world. In their end (telos), so to speak, is their beginning (in praxis).

‘Place’ institutes a complicated, multi-perspectival, dialogical phenomenology.

From the perspective of design practices, place is intimately related to bodily forms and to the differentiations, according to the deictic, associative and affective orientations and horizons of bodies, among ‘my’ places, ‘your’ places, ‘our’ places and ‘their’ places, all of which form complex topological spaces, whose boundaries are often marked by designed artefacts and environments.

As Cecena Alvarez (2015) notes, “A place is not a portion of space. Place is the lived expression of the spatial apprehension of reality.”

Painting

RELATED TERMS: Visual Arts and Visual Media; Photography

Mount Sainte-Victoire, about 1904, Paul Cezanne

Painting is the central, canonical medium of art history.

‘The truth in painting’ is a saying of Cezanne’s. Cezanne wrote to Emile Bernard in 1905 that, “I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you”.

The power ascribed to painting, Derrida (1987) argues, is the power of direct reproduction or restitution, adequation or transparency. The truth in painting could be taken to mean truth itself restored, in person, without mediation, makeup, mask, or veil. In other words, the true truth or the truth of the truth, restituted in its power of restitution, truth looking sufficiently like itself to escape any misprision, any illusion; and even any representation, yet sufficiently divided already to resemble, produce, or engender itself twice over, in accordance with the two genitives: truth of truth (the true truth) and the truth of the truth.

References

Derrida, J. (1987) The Truth in painting. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Photography

RELATED TERMS: Painting; Apparatus – Dispositif; Promptography

In the context of design practices, photography is one of the many media that may be employed, often as part of a multi-media, multi-modal environment or assemblage. As the history of the cultural and artistic disruption caused by photography shows, the use of any particular medium alters the balance of roles among media in engaging with materiality through what might be called a media ecology.

(Media) History of Photography

Wallerstein describes the invention of photography as posing a serious challenge to the system of the fine arts, prompting, first, a crisis in painting. The idea of the subjective and expressive quality of image making, and implicitly the hierarchy between the artes liberals and artes mechanicae that informs the concept of ‘fine art’, underwent a profound upheaval. The question of the image began to be discused in ontological terms. Thus, the question of “what is…” was gradually seen to precede questions of beauty, composition, and so on. This precedence was, in turn, gradually generalized so as to encompass not only painting, but also sculpture, literature, music and finally art in general, becoming an essential feature of modern art, manifested as an aesthetic as well as ontological unrest.

The encounter with photography as a medium that mechanized image production was taken by some as a dismantling of subjectivity and imagination, and possibly even as the end of painting. Such a sentiment is epitomized in Paul Delaroche’s hyperbolic outcry in 1839: “From today, painting is dead”, cited by Wallerstein (2010). Others, however, saw photography as a liberation of the imagination by redirecting it toward the essentials of art.

In this context, as a response to the advent of photography as a mechanical medium, the arrival of abstraction at the beginning of the 20th century could be understood in two ways. First, as the final discovery of what painting had been since the beginning; and second, as a last stance, beyond which painting had to be abandoned in favor of other forms of practice that would be able to interiorize mechanical and serial (re)production into their very substance.

The first stance imagines the painter uncovering a primordial perceptual dimension in and through painting. Such a claim can be understood to underlie Cézanne’s claim to show us “the truth in painting” peinture”), by plunging into the genesis of the visible that takes its cues from the pure sensations of colour. The second stance, emerging in the period around the First World War, accepts that technology has deprived painting not only of its old mimetic function but also dispelled the idea that it could reach a more true, profound, or elevated reality.

To a large extent, Wallerstein, argues, modernist painting evinces the mutual implication and even inextricable entanglement of these two positions.

Ethics and Politics of Photography

The central focus of Vilem Flusser’s investigation of photography is the camera as prototype for the ontologically conditioning apparatuses of postindustrial society, the prototype for all technical apparatuses of the present-day, postindustrial world. His analysis aims ultimately at the ethics of photography (van der Meulen, 2010).

The Ideological Role of Photography

As noted in the post Promptography, photography, and the presumption of photographic realism, dominated the visual field in the early- to mid-20th century through pictorial magazines such as Life in the USA. In “Life: A New Prospectus for the Sixties”, Henry R. Luce, the magazine’s founder and Editor-in-Chief, defined the purpose of Life in the 1960s in terms of national purpose, the two main objectives being to win the Cold War and to create a better America. Luce conceived of Life’s pictures as potent weapons of the Cold War (Blakinger, 2012).

Through its images, Life magazine, under the directive of its editor, took it upon itself to reflect and reify the American Cold War consensus culture of the early 1960s. Nevertheless, as Blakinger points out, advertising also played a central focus in Life‘s mission. A typical issue of Life had more pages of advertising than editorial content. Moreover, these advertisements, by mimicking the large photograph and sparse caption format, looked very similar to photographic essays. In so doing, they lent themselves some of the unquestioned authority that the magazine’s articles were granted by the public. For example, the text of a February 1963 advertisement for supermarket goods from the Life editors states that, by purchasing the advertised products, “You’re also casting a vote for a reputable manufacturer. […] There’s nothing like an American supermarket anywhere in the world. And there’s no more of an all-American businessman than your own supermarket manager.” In other words, the magazine’s editors explicitly equated consumerism and patriotic duty as primordial American values.

Blakinger, by focusing on Andy Warhol’s appropriation and inversion of certain images from Life magazine for his ‘Death and Disaster’ screen-prints, argues that Warhol’s visual strategies reveal a violent subversion of Life‘s assumptions about photographic realism and its attempts at visual indoctrination through its editorial content and its advertisements. The screen-prints demonstrate how Warhol re-presented the familiar pictures of Life as death, and thus transformed Life’s America into Death in America. [For more discussion of Warhol’s Death in America, see the post Iconic Designs, Critical Designs.]

References

Blakinger, J. R. (2012) “Death in America” and “Life” magazine: Sources for Andy Warhol’s “Disaster” paintings, Artibus et Historiae, 33(66), pp. 269–285. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23509753 (Accessed: 27 August 2024).

Elkins, J. (ed.) (2007) Photography theory. New York, NY: Routledge.

van der Meulen, S. (2010) ‘Between Benjamin and McLuhan: Vilem Flusser’s Media Theory’, New German Critique, 37(2), pp. 180–207. doi: 10.1215/0094033X-2010-010.

Wallenstein, S.-O. (2010) Nihilism, Art, and Technology. [PhD thesis] Stockholm, Sweden: Stockholm University. Available at: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-9736 (Accessed: 6 February 2016).

Philosophy

“Where to begin in philosophy has always – rightly – been regarded as a very delicate problem, for beginning means eliminating all presuppositions.” (Gilles Deleuze, 1994: 129)

“The point is not to gain some knowledge about philosophy but to be able to philosophise.” Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology

“to philosophize is to be constantly engaged in the never-ending subversion of states of affairs and of systems of thought; it is to be constantly wary of any attempt to solidify the truth of a particular discourse into a privileged ideology whose structure is epistemically violent.” (Hernandez, 2014)

The word philosophy derives from from the Greek term philosophia which means love of knowledge, pursuit of wisdom or systematic investigation. It is a combination of two roots: philo-, meaning loving and sophia meaning knowledge or wisdom.

Philosophy, experience and questioning

Paraphrasing Susan Stephenson (1999: 5), we could argue that design enquiry, like philosophical enquiry, begins with challenges that arise concretely within the life of a particular individual, particular groups or particular societies. It proceeds through a process of dialectical confrontations with different responses to how these challenges can be defined and addressed.

The value of philosophy for design practices and analysis of design action is perhaps best demonstrated with reference to Gregory Fried’s (2011: 240) characterisation of philosophical practice. While acknowledging that there is no consensus on what constitutes philosophy, Fried suggests that philosophy can be thought of as having three moments, moments which are perhaps also present in design practice, as will be discussed below.

The first moment, as articulated by Aristotle in the Metaphysics, is that philosophy begins with a sense of wonder (thaumazein in Greek). That wonder is the experiencing of something as deserving or demanding our attention because it is delightful, puzzling and enticing. Equally, it could be argued that philosophy might begin with a sense of horror or trauma, which may be similarly demanding of our attention, but not for reasons of delight. The crucial point is that philosophy begins with experience and perhaps heightened experience of some kind.

The second moment is the formulation of a philosophical question, an act that requires an intense focus on precisely what is at issue in our wonder [or horror or trauma], as we open to and admit the questions that confront us out of our own individual lived experience, through the embeddedness of the self in the world. By posing questions, we begin to philosophise through what seizes us and what challenges our world. It is the form of the question which guides what may be considered an appropriate response.

The third moment is answering, albeit however provisionally, or responding to the question.This may involve reformulating the question in the process of responding to it. Modern academic philosophical practice tends to focus on this last moment. The proper work of philosophy is seen, from this perspective, to be the production of answers, in the form of rigorous arguments with clear conclusions. However, as Fried argues, fixating on the moment of providing answers as the sole or primary work of philosophy distorts the full scope of what thinking demands of us.

Parallels can be drawn between this characterisation of philosophical practice and design practice. These parallels might be recognised more readily if one takes Martin Heidegger’s (2009: 11) suggestion that,

“The two questions asked in philosophy are, in plain terms:

1. What is it that really matters?

2. Which way of posing questions is genuinely directed to what really matters.”

For design practice, those questions may need to be extended, to become 1. What is it that really matters, to whom, for whom, in what ways(s), in what situation(s), of what duration? 2. Which ways of posing questions or challenges are genuinely directed to what really matters to whom, for whom, in what way(s), in what situation(s), of what duration?

More generally, like philosophy, design practice is not simply problem solving or answer-giving (moment three in Gregory Fried’s scheme), although, similarly to philosophy, most contemporary design practice is focused on this third moment of giving answers to problems, i.e. providing design solutions. However, to echo Fried, fixating on this moment of providing solutions, in the form of constructed artefacts or designed systems with explicit functions or uses, as the sole or primary work of design distorts the full scope of what design practice, as a mode of thinking, demands of us.

Design practice, like philosophy, needs to work on all three moments. Without good design questions, that are founded in experience and heightened awareness such as moments of wonder, horror or trauma, and a questioning of that experience in relations to the processes of the material social, economic, political and environmental world, such proffered solutions may lead to situations that are even more problematic than the initial one.

Design practice, then, like philosophy, does not begin with the production of answers or solutions but rather with a sense of wonder, or perhaps sometimes horror or trauma, and the posing of questions arising from and within that experience. Crucially, it is the formulation of the design question or questions that is key to arriving at valuable ‘results’. The question does not determine the precise result but it does, however, orient the direction of design processes.

One question might be whether such philosophical or design thinking can be systematised or made into a method. In response, it could be said, as does Friedrich Schlegel in his Athenaeum Fragments, that philosophy is a way of trying to be a systematic spirit without having a system, a position similar to that of Hannah Arendt.

Conventional understandings of philosophy as discipline

More conventionally, students of Plato and other ancient philosophers divide philosophy into three parts: ethics, the principles and import of moral judgment; epistemology, the resources and limits of knowledge; and metaphysics, the rational investigation of the nature and structure of reality. While useful for pedagogical purposes, however, no rigid boundary separates the parts.

David Woodruff Smith (2013) states that traditionally philosophy includes at least four core fields or disciplines: ontology, epistemology, ethics and logic. He suggests that phenomenology can be added to that list. On that basis, he provides elementary definitions of the field of philosophy as follows:

Ontology (Metaphysics): the study of beings or their being — what is.
Epistemology: the study of knowledge — how we know.
Logic: the study of valid reasoning — how to reason.
Ethics: the study of values — how we should act.
Phenomenology: the study of our experience — how we experience.

Other domains of conventional academic philosophical investigation are:

semantics, the examination of the relationship between language and reality; and
aesthetics, the examination of notions of sensory perception and beauty.

All of these domains, that is, ethics, epistemology, metaphysics or ontology, logic, semantics, aesthetics and phenomenology, may be of value in design practice, so long as the focus is not simply or solely on producing results, that is, problem solving, but also on experiencing and questioning.

This list of categories, it may be noticed, avoids any notion of politics and political philosophy. This is perhaps a further domain that is of interest to both philosophy and design practice:

politics and the political: the examination of the ways in which social groups and societies theorise, organise and regulate themselves through cultural rules, norms, laws and systems of governnment.

References

Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and repetition. Translated by P. Patton. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Fried, G. (2011). A Letter to Emmanuel Faye. Philosophy Today, 55 (3), 219–252. Available from https://www.academia.edu/2613554/A_Letter_to_Emmanuel_Faye [Accessed 29 August 2016].

Heidegger, M. (2009) Phenomenological interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into phenomenological research. Translated by R. Rojcewicz. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Hernandez, M. R. F. (2014) Philosophy and subversion: Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction from the margins, Filocracia, 1(2), pp. 105–134.

Smith, D.W. (2013). Phenomenology. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/#5 [Accessed 5 September 2016].

Stephenson, S. (1999) ‘Narrative, identity and modernity’, in ECPR workshop ‘The Political Uses of Narrative’ Mannheim, 29-31 March, 1999, pp. 1–18. Available at: https://ecpr.eu/Filestore/PaperProposal/37fe9dc5-6ad9-4a73-b35a-704d8265ecb0.pdf (Accessed: 31 March 2021).

Performance

RELATED TERMS: Actantiality; Happenings; Performance Art; Performative and Performativity; Metalepsis

The terms performance and performative are important for design practice because, it is argued, designs are performed by a participant. This performance takes on a different character depending on the character of the design itself and may involve a combination of consumption by a consumer; reception and interpretation by a reader, spectator or audience; or instrumental use by a user, as well as scripted or unscripted improvisational actions and decisions by the participant.

The performativity of the design may also be discussed in terms of actantiality or actantiality-passantiality. In any case, through performance, the ‘as if’ is brought together with the ‘is’, to explore actual or potential transformations from one state of being to another. Systems of performative transformations, whatever their material aspects, Schechner (2004, xviii) notes, “also include incomplete, unbalanced transformations of time and space: doing a specific “there and then” in this particular “here and now” in such a way that all four dimensions are kept in play.”

Richard Schechner conceives of the topics which relate to the term performance as a fan or as a web, as follows:

Performance1 Source: Richard Schechner, Performance Theory

Performance2 Source: Richard Schechner, Performance Theory

References

Parker, A. and Sedgwick, E. K. (eds) (1995) Performativity and performance. New York, NY: Routledge.

Schechner, R. (2004) Performance theory. Rev & exp.ed. New York, NY: Routledge.

Passant

RELATED TERMS: Actant; Interpretant

The term passant is used to refer to a character in a narrative viewed from the perspective of the impressions registered on him or her, rather than from the perspective of the actions he or she performs. Rabinowitz (2005, 184) invented this term as a contrast to actant. Thus Rabinowitz states that his approach,

“makes us take the experiences of other characters more seriously on the level of the narrative audience. or, more accurately, it encourages us to take them seriously in a different way than the way promoted by classical narratology: specifically, if we take the notion of path (and experience) seriously, we might want to consider a narratology that included not only ‘actants’ but also ‘passants’ – those (especially including those beyond the narrator and his or her chosen focalizers) on whom impressions are registered.”

An analysis that takes ‘passants’ seriously may yield new perspectives from which to reflect on the story, Rabinowitz suggests.

Extended to the context of design practice, it refers to any entity upon which impressions are registered, leaving a trace that may itself subsequently have actantial potential. Actantiality would be rendered meaningless without passantiality, but they are not binary opposites. They weave round one another in an inter-actantial or inter-passantial cycle or as a kind of double helix of actantiality-passantiality, merging into one another responsively. Passantiality is, thus, a kind of potentiality. A passant is also a kind of interpretant, in the Peircean sense; or, perhaps, actantiality-passantiality defines the relationship named as interpretant.

Janet Rachel brings to attention a line of argument which suggests that, among the various ways of understanding actants and passants, there is a rather interesting connection with the body, and with gender, which tends to privilege acting over passing on phallocentric grounds. Thus she notes,

“Thomas Laqueur (1992) has reminded us that in the relatively recent past it was believed that women and men possessed essentially the same genitals. Where woman wore hers on the inside of her body, man had his on the outside. Ready to hand, as it were: the quintessential tool. And although modern anatomical thought maintains that the two kinds of genitals are now different, and not simply each other’s mirror image, we do still believe them to be respectively worn inside and outside the body. Freud (1925, 1937) has speculated on the potential significance of this anatomical difference for the human psyche, and in doing so, he has indicated the role of sight as arbiter: that which can be seen to move is treated as the superior and more prized variety.”

She proposes a passant-network theory as a means to comprehend the actantiality of the passant, rather than converting thr passant into an agent. We might suggest that actant and passant networks cannot exist one without the other.

References

Rabinowitz, Peter J (2005). They shoot tigers, don’t they?: path and counterpoint in The Long Goodbye In: A Companion to narrative theory, edited by J. Phelan and P. J. Rabinowitz. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 181-191.

Rachel, J. (1994) ‘Acting and passing, actants and passants, action and passion’, American Behavioral Scientist, 37(6), pp. 809–823. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0002764294037006007 (Accessed: 17 November 2018).

Participant

RELATED TERMS: Actant; Performance; Performativity

Participants are those taking an active part in a design interaction, understood as an event. The term participant is preferred to that of ‘user’ to avoid the more functionalist connotations of that term, and to suggest that a ‘visitor’ to an event is more engaged than a reader, spectator or audience member. They are more of a performer, partaking in a degree of scripted performance mixed with improvisation.

The notion of participation posits an active involvement of participants in the generation of the work, at a profound level, through interaction with, arrangement of, or even production of, its elements.

Theoretically, a participant is understood as an actant, one whose performativity contributes to the overall field of actantiality that as design, as event, constitutes.

Paradigm

RELATED TERMS: Performance and Performativity

Bowers (2014) considers that an onto-epistemological paradigm permits a unique world outlook which assumes distinctive approaches to shared universal concepts. Within a paradigm, points of view about the world’s constitution and its structure are compatible ontologically. Its values, concerns, conventions and assumptions, ‘truths’ and traditions of working in the world are also generally shared epistemologically.

The positivist, functionalist or structural-functionalist systems paradigm is the world of modern science and social science. It is a world of certainty, of logical proofs and deductions, reproducibly verifiable facts and hypotheses, exact measurements, objective observation, of unbiased and universal truths.

The interpretivist systems paradigm points out that each of us sees the world differently, subjectively, and each of us knows or understands it in their own way. This paradigm is concerned with and cares about reconciling issues of individuality and personal differences in a social world. It accepts that we disagree and are unpredictable. Reasoning is more often inductive and situated.

The postmodernist-poststructuralist systems paradigm acknowledges the limitations of human understanding. It appreciates a world of unfathomable depth and inter-active dimensionality; considers events which are sometimes fleetingly transient, spontaneous or non-rational; the true nature of the world thwarts our attempts to ‘know’ it. The world we do ‘know’ and the values we hold are socially constructed, it says, and they are relative. Reliant upon our constructions in human-language, ignorances and biases are unavoidable. We must, therefore, reflexively question the very bases of our assumptions. This paradigm exposes us to our limitations and can and should engender transparency, humility and open-mindedness.

The critical-emancipatory, or simply ‘critical’, systems paradigm can be characterized by its three commitments, or themes for debate: critical reflection; pluralism; and emancipation, or perhaps simply improvement. The critical systems thinking paradigm has liberated us from the one-size-fits-all, ‘hard’, positivist approach to everything for all occasions, or what from a larger perspective has been called imperialist or isolationist practices by Midgley (1992). The word ‘critical’ itself signifies an ethical commitment to critical reflexivity, that is, to self-critical, self-reflection and ideological critique (Gregory, 1992). To these ends, philosophy charges us with taking responsibility for our action or indeed inaction.

What is difficult to formulate is a logically coherent framework which can properly ground and inform multiparadigmatic, multimethodological approaches to practice. Design practices seek to be open to multiparadigmatic, multimethodological approaches to practice.

References

Bowers, T. D. (2014) ‘Developments in critical systems theory: on paradigms and incommensurability’, Proceedings of the 58th Meeting of ISSS, Washington DC, USA, July 2014. Available at: http://journals.isss.org/index.php/proceedings58th/article/viewFile/2251/754 (Accessed: 26 February 2016).

Gregory, Wendy J. (1992) Critical systems thinking and pluralism: a new constellation. [PhD thesis]. Systems Science department, City University, London.
Gregory,

Midgley, Gerald (1992) Pluralism and the legitimation of systems science. Systems Practice, 5(2), 147-172.