Design Is/Is Not the Problem: Disciplinary and Ethological Considerations

For a panel on "Design as a Wicked Problem" at University Art Association Canada annual conference in Ottawa, October 28, 2011 John Calvelli Alberta College of Art + Design

In a recent paper, Sustainability as a project of history, Clive Dilnot states: Sustainability is that which most cruelly exposes design. Nothing reveals more sharply both the necessity and inconsequentiality of design: its (absolute) necessity as capacity, and its almost complete irrelevance as a value, or indeed as a profession. (Dilnot, 2011) Those are pretty harsh words. Since the Industrial Revolution, design has been on a roll; the world has been transformed not once, but continually. In all its forms and disciplines, design has redrawn, reshaped and reconstituted everything from spoons to cities, but what and how we see, hear, eat and experience, enabling our birth and mediating our death. Hardly irrelevant except in a world made unsustainable by design. Given this material, social and ontological capacity, we need it now, more than ever, to undo or counter the consequences of its own apparent success. But design, like any profession, seeks its place in the world, and once that place is secured it is difcult to change. Having produced and reproduced this world endlessly, the profession nds itself at a loss when confronted with that worlds unsustainability. As designers, we want to roll up our sleeves and get to work to solve this immense problem that is our world today and its future. But the historical algorithms with which we have programmed our practices and profession of design confound us, and we either nd ourselves working on the kinds of problems whose solutions got us into the mess in the rst place, or unable to nd methods and arenas whereby we can tackle the ones that matter. What seems to be our problem is not that we are unable to actor to dobut rather that, fearful of irrelevance, we are unable to not do. Agamben, from a recent essay, On What We Can Not Do: Separated from his impotentiality [his power to not do], todays man believes himself capable of everything, and so he repeats his jovial no problem, and his irresponsible I can do it, precisely when he should realize that he has been consigned in unheard of measure to forces and processes over which he has lost all control. He has become blind not to his capacities but to his incapacities, not to what he can do but to what he cannot,

or can not, do. (Agamben, 2010) This is the wicked problem the design profession nds itself in. Confronting the wicked problem of unsustainability, we can choose to do, that is, to undertake to solve it; or we can choose to not do, purposely ignoring it. If we do, we risk causing more problems in a situation where we have no right to be wrong, characteristics of wicked problems as described by Rittel and Webber (Rittel and Weber, 1973); if we choose to not do, we feel our wicked problem risks becoming even more wicked.

We must broaden our denition of what it means, and how, to design. The broadest denition must certainly be Herbert Simons, from 1969: Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. Not only does this allow us to view design from outside of specic disciplinary frameworks; for instance, like those of architecture and graphic design; it also allows us to broaden our view of design to an ethological dimension, in two senses: as ethos, and thus a characteristic human cultural behaviour; and in its traditional zoological sense as a characteristic animal behaviour shaped by natural selection. Using Simons denition, can we not say that animals design? For example, doesnt a spider devise its web or a pack of wolves its kill in order to change an existing stateof hungerto a preferred oneof satiation? We can refute this view only by appealing to either our exceptional cognitive capabilities as humans, or by pointing to the capacities language gives us to distinguish states of devising from other states that might be more appropriate for characterizing the cognitive capabilities of the so-called lower animals, e.g., behaviours of seeking, attempting or randomly experimenting. I suggest we need to consider this view, precisely because of its anthropocentrism. We are only now coming to the brink of awareness of our limited future, and thus have arrived at our most existentially wicked of problems. If we are to reclaim a future that now closes in on us in the name of the unsustainable, then it would appear incumbent upon us to understand how this species-level process of natural selection may be seen to operate. It is natural selection that has gotten us this far, as a cognitively aware, materially inventive species that thrives in strangely extravagant waysat the expense, of course, of the extinction of countless other species and with a diminishing future for ourselves. But natural selection isnt only benign. Looking around us, we see only its successes. Before we arrived, the history of the world was already littered with the failed experiments of natural selection: we fuel our cars with the rened remains of some of them. Before becoming fuel for another species experiment, perhaps we can use it to perpetuate our own.

Natural selection is a blindly algorithmic process that requires only three conditions: the presence of variation, environmental selection (choosing better adapted variations over others), and heredity, (a mechanism to pass down the characteristics of the selected-for variation). The presence of these three requirements will produce as much life as possible within a given ecosystem. As a species ourself, we tend to view this life in terms of other species, the variety of animals and plants among us. However, natural selection works not only and not necessarily primarily at the level of species and genes, but at other levels as well. Research in molecular biology over the last few decades has discovered evidence for other, non-genetic methods of adaptive heredity. Jablonka and Lamb have proposed that, in addition to classical genetic explanations for evolution, there are also epigenetic ones, which chemically mark genes in order to allow traits to be passed directly to the next generation; and in addition two others: the passing down of behaviours through animal imitation, and of ideas through symbolic means. (Jablonka, 2005) In other words, the process of natural selection goes all the way down. It works at every level, all the time. It is present in the variety of papers being presented at this conference. It is present in the human behaviour of storytelling. And it is present, in spades, in designwhere the process of producing variation and selection is already well established. From the beginning of their education, for instance, we encourage students to spin as much variation as possible; through the critique process we create an environment where some variations are selected from among others. Methods of pedagogy, curriculum models, best practices and even more suspect means like publication in design annuals are all mechanisms of heredity, passing on the more successful behaviours of designing, in some cases only for a year or season, in other cases over generations. Natural selection works best when the qualities of fecundity, delity and longevity are present. We must produce as many variations as possible in ways that preserve the integrity of the originating idea, and that have the ability to last as long as possible. Advertising jingles are monumentally fecund, but dont have much longevity. A museum-quality work of art has greater overall longevity but cant generally match the jingles fecundity. The designing of a brand is a powerful example of natural selection at work. A brand is designed to stick in as many minds as would be advantageous for company being branded. It needs always to be clearly and consistently articulated within its competitive environment; and it needs to appear as long-lasting as possible. In this way, corporations like BP can better withstand the public opprobrium of a massive oil spill. Natural selection isnt always benign. So where does that leave us? No doubt, in as wicked a place as before. Regardless whether we design with intent in the jocular manner of can do, or empowered by an understanding of natural selection, the outcome is not likely to be betterand could, in fact, be worse. Natural

selection is an adaptive process that happens in a given ecosystem. We can become even more effective at designing, but adapting ourselves for the wrong ecosystem, and become another failed experiment. There may be another way to think about this, in a way that would be anthropocentrically advantageous. Perhaps, by applying natural selection to our most selected-for characteristic, cognition, we might nd a way to encounter our wicked problem in the right spirit, outside of the framework of the ignorant can do and an ignoring can not do. Our cognitive bag of tricks is impressive; so impressive that we are loathe to consider some of them tricks at all. First among them is our self-consciousness, our notion of an I. Hard to imagine acting in the world without iteven if it is a screen that prevents us from understanding our connection to the vast network of organisms and ideas that provide for our very possibility. A related trick is our sense of intention, the very I can Agamben refers to. Just what is the I that can? Intentionality is a great trick that can increase our apparent longevity, by devising a course of action that plans, designs and executes a monument to a Roman victory in 100 AD that still exists today. We can, with intent, create civilizations that last for centuries or millennia, and create social systems that support them, based in slavery, social stratication or commodied labour. We can even send people to the moon. The problem is that some of the many ways we can approach our world with intent are not very nice, nor fruitful. In some cases, they might lead to our immediate or eventual destruction. This is because our cognition and biology are distinct systems, subject in their own ways to natural selection, even if they are as well deeply intertwined. In our pursuit of our cognitive well-being we both risk and deny the threats to our biological well-being. Every organism, on some level, has an ability to judge well-being. When an organisms being is threatened by the environment, it responds to restore its well-being. Of course, this judgment is not in all cases cognitional. No doubt, humans have a sophisticated sense of biological wellbeing. In some cases if not most, however, our cognitive system usurps the biological. We have luxury cars, reality television, Beethoven symphonies and many other things we can use to restore a sense of compromised well-being. This, in fact, is the world we live in, the designed world; and we consequently need a very large jolt of threat in order to turn our attention back to the need to act to restore biological well-being. To the extent we have been successful as a species, weve both been able to create an armour of cognitive well-being at the same time as we create the conditions for an unfolding threat to our biological well-being. This is why we will likely continue to design as usualthat is to say, we will design the unsustainable even as we think we are designing sustainablyuntil such time as news of biological catastrophe pierces the armour of our cognitive well-being. So far, our broadening of design into the realm of natural selection has perhaps been a sober,

but not very promising direction. It has enabled us to view very clearly a massively wicked problem, but hasn't supplied many tools of hope or guiding rationale for how to proceed as we return to the discipline of design. And yet, what is natural selection but the process by which life moves towards more life? Surely, there must be something we can use. I think so. Natural selection is the process by which life produces as much life as possible (fecundity) in as many forms as possible (variety) for as long as possible (longevity). This has been observed, by Darwin and others, for over 150 years. There are many ways we can apply this to our cognitive life. One way is to do so by means of ethical intent. Lets translate this biological description into cognitive and cultural dimensions: Natural selection is the process by which life produces as much cognitive and cultural life as possible, in as many diverse forms as possible, for as long as possiblefor the purpose of more life. Applying this process to all lifebiological, cognitive and culturalmight it produce a species with more respect for a diverse ecosystem, with hospitality to all others, and aiming for more future, not less? Perhaps: it is just another cognitive construction. Im not sure I would recommend applying it in the spirit of can do. But sitting at our design desk again, wondering what or whether to do, it might allow us to realize that we can not do, in the spirit of allowing natural selection do what it does best.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Nudities. Stanford Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010. Print. Dilnot, Clive. Sustainability as a Project of History. Design 2011.2 n. pag. Web. 19 Aug. 2011. Jablonka, Eva, and Marion J. Lamb. Evolution in four dimensions: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic variation in the history of life. MIT Press, 2005. Print. Rittel, H., and M. Webber. Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy sciences 4.2 (1973): 155169. Print. Simon, Herbert. The sciences of the articial. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1969. Print.