I’m going to introduce the concept of redirective practice, but in order to do this, I’m going to talk about design briefly in a fundamental way and put that into context with economy. So, some of the ways I understand things may be different from the ways you understand them, so first of all, I’ve got six things to say about design:
- The first one is that it is anthropologically fundamental to our being. Design, in a sense, has been responsible for what we are. We have become human by design. What that means is that design has been part of the way in which we’ve both seen the world and created the world. Design in these terms is understood as prefiguration, which is to say having an idea in our mind and an intention in our mind that goes ahead of our actions. There’s a kind of insivisble relation between design, cognition and imagination. That’s the first thing.
- The second one is that design is far more important than we generally recognise, including, even if we are a designer. So this is the comparison: there is the present and the activity of design in the world, so we are surrounded by a world that is a product by design. We live within a world, with-in the world that we have created, a world of fabrication. That world of fabrication where design proliferates in every dimension of that domain. So design is present as the environment in which we exist. But if you look at the litterature in design, if you look at design education, there is a vast gap between what is presented to us as design and the presence of design. So I am drawing attention to design as omnipresent as opposed to design as a practice and an object of consideration, exploration and creation. So that’s the first thing to say about the omnipotence of design. So we live in design. Design is not just a thing or practice, it is elemental to our becoming. So on the one hand, prefiguratively we are designers, but existentially, we are also design by being in the world that is design. So it is in that respect an ontological domain. So now there’s a kind of implication to that, there’s an implication of being a designer in this world of design, there is a fundamentally ethical dimension to design.
- So design ethics for me has nothing to do with the conduct or the practice of being a design, it is more fundamentally, it is the fact than design is dialectically indivisible from destruction and creation. Ethically, it is what makes the distinction between the one and the other. Because dialectically, whenever we create, we also destroy. You cannot bring something in to position without an act of creation and destruction. In terms of what I’m saying now, to some people, what I’m doing is that I’m introducing an idea that for some people would destroy their understanding of design that they currently have. So conceptually, that dialectic is in play all the time. Old ideas are destroyed by new ideas, but equally in the very material sense, the matter of the world that we create dominantly comes from an act of destruction. Now, the significance of that in relation todesign as ethics is that know it or not, every time we make a design decision, we are also making the decision that directs our action towards creation or destruction. So at a very, very simple level, we create a meal by destroying the food that we, in a sense, create. Now that is absolutely justifiable, so that is not a problem, but on the other hand, with many things which are a problem, we destroy the environment by extractive industries. So the issue there is does the end justify the means? Does what create by destroying an environment actually justifies what is produced through that act of destruction? So that creates a reflective imperative: the need when we design to construct a moment of critical interrogation, intervention, which makes us consider “does what I am creating justify what I am destroying”. So I’m posting that as a perpetual and fundamental question.
- The next thing is, the relation that we have as a practice, a relation to design as a service generally means the most important design decisions are made before we come on the sea. In other words, the client’s brief really creates the most significant moment of decision in relation to design, and that throws up the challenge of how does the designer take back the responsibility for making the first and the most fundamental design decisions? in other words, how does the designer transform the brief? I’m gonna leave that there as a question that we might talk about a little bit later.
- The fifth thing, the fifth fundamental observation about design is that design is power. In other words, the degree to which we have the ability to design. I can exercise ability directly correlate to how much time we have to put it the other way, to be absolutely powerless in the world is to have no ability to design, in other words to have no ability to alter the circumstances that you’re in. So that relation to power, you know, doesn’t actually enter into the picture, for example in design education and it’s not very present at all in design theory or design history, but it is absolutely critical to understand. Now if you put that together with what I’m saying about design being more important than we generally recognize, in order to be able to address the problems that we confront the problems which are determining our future and the future of our species in general and the future of other species, design has to be more powerful and has to be more ethical in the way that I’ve discussed. so the last observation is that our species has no future unless we actually transform the nature of the world that we create by design. So design in this sense is decisive in relation to the future of our species, and the implication here is that everything that we design goes on designing. Design in that respect is an event. we need to kind of change how we view both things and environments. We need to see things in process rather than as static. An object is an event. I’m sitting in a chair. The chair is actually determining my ability to sit. Something is happening in relation to my sitting in a chair. At a huge level, you know, we live in cities. Cities need to be understood as design events. Both the chair and the city have an ontological consequence on us. We are a product of the world in which we inhabit through its designing of our condition of being and the nature of our being. So that relation of understanding design as event is indivisible from understanding design ontologically. So if we want to change we have to transform the conditions of our becoming, which is very different from the proposition that we change by having our consciousness raised, or the raising of the consciousness of others. The ability to transform our ontological conditions is enormously difficult, but is far easier than trying to transform the consciousness of an entire population. So that’s my first part that’s my disturbing of many people’s take for granted understandings of design.
Now on to economy. I am drawing on a famous French writer who you may or may not know: George Bataille. Bataille lived from 1867 to 1967. He was a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, he was a writer, a thinker, a surrealist, and his work has become more influential through the last few decades. What he presented in terms of what I’m talking about is a particular way of understanding the economy, which is very volent to what I’ve been saying in relation to design. He described the economy in two ways:
- The first way was understood as a restricted economy of limitation, of conditions of exchange. Now that actually describes the condition of capitalism.
- His other way of understanding economy was through the notion of the general economy, and the basis of the general economy is to understand that everything exists in a condition of exchange. Everything is a process of transformation through that condition of exchange. The biological word that we live in is the most obvious example of this process that makes that world in existence is the result of an exchange between organic matter, minerals and so on. So life is a condition of exchange. Now the relation between the two is one of non-relation. So what we’ve actually done is to create, as a species, a restricted economy that is disconnected at a fundamental level from the general economy. And that is why in the environmental crisis, that is why there is a crisis of the loss of biodiversity because this disconnect is something which is just fundamentally not recognized. So effectively, the way that we make the world is sacrificing the future for the present because of this disconnect between the restricted and the general economy. So at the most fundamental level, this is the issue that we have. This is the transformation of the world that we have to be able to make by design.
As you can see, what I’ve done is that I dramatically escalated the importance of design and doing so I’ve created this great big gap between the practices that people are inducted into as designers and the challenge of what has to be designed. So I’m illustrating again the gap between the importance of design and the activity of design. So what is the practice that we need to be able to develop, to be able to address this problem? This is what I call redirective practice. I just wanna make one other qualification before I get to it. I want to go and put a picture in your head, in your mind. That relates to how we understand this relation between the general and restricted economy. And I’m gonna use a very familiar term: again I’m gonna turn away from its acceptable understanding. I’m going to use the word consumption. So consumption is regarded as a kind of a positive and a negative. We are in a situation at the moment as a result of Covid where economies are in trouble. And the automatic way in which the response to that situation has been made economically, is to again assert the imperative of increasing consumption. Ever since the great depression in the US in the 1920s, every economic crisis has been attempted to be resolved by the stimulation, the increase of consumption, but put into the context of the general restricted economy, what we discover is that there is a correlation between the economic and the medical condition of consumption. Consumption is used in English to describe the disease of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is a disease where the body eats itself from the inside and that’s effectively what consumption does in terms of restrictive economy in relation to the general economy. They are not connected in terms of function of exchange, but at the same time the corrosive effect of the restrictive economy is eating away the kind of resources and the conditions that the general economy depends on.
So imposing redirective practice in relation to this context, I’m doing something that isn’t based upon a kind of a utopian idealism. It’s not based upon dystopic fatalism either, and it certainly is not based upon the notion that somehow technology is a salvational power, which is gonna save us. Fundamentally what is serves is that in order to deal with our condition of structural unsustainability as a species, we have to transform the conditions of our becoming. And that isn’t so much about designing new things. It’s about repairing the world that we’ve already created. So that depends upon the redirection of what it is that we do. So what I’m suggesting here is that design needs to become a redirecting practice, and again I’ll just use a couple of examples and I’ll use my own work to illustrate the point.
My relation to redirective practice has meant that I’ve worked on post-colonialist environments, working in Timoleste, in Colombia, in relation to violence. So in a sense redirecting environments that are violent to being constructive, or simply that takes a lot of explanation to really clearly understand. Not so difficult to understand is the work that I’ve done and do in relation to cities. So the redirective objective of the city is to transform it in terms of its ontological agency as an event. So what I did, I developed a concept called Metrofitting, which is taking the idea of retrofitting up to the scale of a city, but not just seeing it instrumentally, of repairing things that are material broken, but also repairing the social and cultural fabric of the city. So that creates an entirely different kind of design agenda and creates an entire different way of thinking about how you organize a design practice. It liberates a designer from a relation to a client as we currently understand about relation, and it does it through the kind of notion of design becoming an autonomous practice. Autonomous the level of the individual action of the designer being the author of their own projects, which requires redirecting the economic relations that allow you to earn a living. So I’m mentioning these things and realizing they are schematics, every one of these things is a major topic and project in its own right? But equally, autonomous design connects to communities so the function of the designer in relation to community is the enablement of that community to acquire design power in their own right to be able to address their own problems. Now this isn’t purely my idea. It is also the idea of the Colombian anthropologist and now design theories Arturo Escobar and it is something that isn’t just actually floating around as an idea that creates a conversation. It is a practice imply in relation to communities in Columbia and now in other places.
So let me just kind of finish up by reconnecting more directly to design. Because everything I’ve said about redirection first goes to design itself. In other words, if we want design to be more powerful, if we want design to be able to address the problems that humanity faces, the nature of design itself has to be redirective. So we need in a sense to create an entirely new iteration of design to become a more powerful agent of affirmative change. Design has to become a post-disciplinal practice, and for that to be possible we have to unload design in order to reload design. So the implication of what I’m saying is that it is an enormous project overtime and it begins with a condition of dissatisfaction, a condition of alienation, a condition of frustration, so in order to embark upon this project, you have to be dissatisfied with the relation that you have with design at the moment, and I know in talking to some of you, I may feel that some of you may not. What is crucial is the creation of a critical mass of people who do embark upon that transformation of design.
So the transformation is to go back to what I said a few months ago towards design being an autonomous practice with great build more power, and all of this is predicated upon making sustainment an imperative of design. Sustainment isn’t the same as sustainability. Sustainment is a project of intellectual practical importance significance in comparative scale is the size at least as much as the Enlightenment. In other words sustainment is a decisive transformative moment in human history that is directly engaging, and I’m using this term with reservation, but to save time the statement is that which engages and overcomes the problem of the Anthropocene.
So what I’ve done is I’ve given you a very quick snapshot of a way of thinking and approaching design, which is very different from almost all professional practices. I’ll just end with two qualificative terms of people who want to be able to take what I’ve said further. In 1999 I wrote a book called “An introduction to defuturing”. That is just been republished in the last few days. The title has been changed to “Defuturing, a new design philosophy”. Just pulling it up so you can see it. So defuturing is the negative dimension of the dialectic. It is the way that we take the future away by design, and this is a rewriting of the history of design from that perspective, which goes along with the dialectical opposite imperative of futuring, so I both work in relation to defuturing and futuring, and if you want to find some resources in terms of what I’m saying, if you look at my website on the website and you have to write this all one word, the website is www.thestudioatheedgeoftheworld.com
So that’s my studio in Tasmania and there’s an archive of many many articles and there are a number of books. So the intent of my presentation today besides generating a discussion now is to create sufficient amount of curiosity for you to explore what I said. Thank you.
Questions réponses
Q: First question, how do you feel towards the future?
Tony Fry: OK I’m gonna answer that in this way. If we look at the problems that we are confronted, for many of us, they will seem to be impossible. The challenge that we have is so enormous that we might not feel that we have the ability to overcome it. What I say about that is, impossibility is indivisible from our level of knowledge. So historically, if you go back in any moment of time, the things that we have now done would seem to be from that moment in the past to be impossible. So the history of humanity is the continual attainment of the impossible. So I don’t know whether we can solve all the problems that we have. I don’t believe we can solve them all, many we have to simply live with, but we can solve others So I’m not pessimistic or realistic about the future. I’m in a sense determined to engage the problems and my way of engaging those problems is to try to know more about how to act in our current circumstances. So my relation to the future is to accept the responsibility to contribute to its creation.
Q: Someone just mentioned in the chat saying that it’s outstanding talk someone is following you since the very first books. Please continue the events and towards sustainment by design cheer up for you. There’s another question yesterday we welcomed a couple of students who were talking about their view, their opinion on design and how they consider the practice right now. And we talk a lot about creation what is your what is your take on co-creation because you’ve been talking about creation and power and how we can delegate the power to communities but what’s your take on co-creation?
Tony Fry: Both co-creation and co-design obviously indivisible for what I was saying about autonomous design. What I was saying about autonomous design is indivisible from co-creation and co-design provided the relation of the designer is one where power is distributed. So co-creation means giving up the position of absolute authority, giving up the notion of being directive of design. It requires being an enabler of design rather than the manager and the author of design.
Q: Absolutely perfect transition towards my next question there’s a lot of ego in human beings and enabling people too. How how what what are what is your advice about all the young designers starting to practice and can we be we able to leave egos behind?
Tony Fry: Probably not, but we can actually bring corrective practices, so you know the notion of redirection isn’t something that we do in the world, it’s something that we have to bring to ourselves. We have to learn how to redirect ourselves, and there are some things that we can do in relation to it. One of the most Important ones is to understand the significance of modesty. So modesty means understanding that we can’t start from the solution: it means starting in a small way at the beginning of a process. It means not claiming undue agency from the things that we do. It means not simply making the objective of your efforts to be for yourself. So in a sense you know it comes back to using ethical imperatives as a way redirecting yourself in the way that I talked about ethics having a materiality rather than just being an ideal from a particular time of history. So in a sense, it’s the question of not to or not eliminate your ego, but using it to direct what you do in ways that are not simply about your own self satisfaction.
Q: very very inspiring. We have a question here from Thibault, I’m going to read it out loud about the lement of communities to design. What’s obstacles permanently its weight can you elaborate on the practice that aims at enabling previously powerless communities into addressing their own condition?
Tony Fry: so I’ll give you an example give you an example of a community in southern Colombia that is it made up of farmers, made up of people who were Gorillas who have been demobilized, made up of women from villages who came together to try to improve their social relations on their economic conditions. But in order for that to be possible, they had to create a common project. And a common project became a way of how they negotiated their difference and change the relation of time between those people. They decided because they were in an area of grew coffee, they would actually use the creation of coffee as a project to be able to work together to constitute change through design. So they perceived what they were doing in terms of growing a marketing coffee, not purely in terms of coffee, but as a social project of their end, of learning to work and collaborate and also as a communication project, so the coffee became the way of communicating the economic and social project. The packaging of the project, the marketing of the project was all about marketing that activity So in a sense, the coffee itself was secondary to the actual object of design, which was the communication of the ability of people to collaborate together making design decisions. So there were a group of designers working with a community, but what they simply did was facilitate the realization of the ideas that were generated by the community. So you can see that’s a very different relation between a designer working to a client. They were they weren’t given a design project taking away from the community. They were responding to facilitating the designing generated by the community.
Q: Thank you for this very clear example of how to enable people to harness design. We have a couple of questions one is asked by and he’s asking how can we think about this deep transformation to a design based on distribution of power and enabling autonomous design in a neo-liberal economy.
Tony Fry: obviously that’s an enormous challenge. But there are two things that I always think about in relation to this:
- the first is your identification of a problem itself, so in a sense every problem could be kind of evaluated as a potential project, so how did you go looking for a problem that could become a project. I’ll give you an example in a moment.
- The other is we are in a condition of impending and actual breakdowns so yes, we are in a neo-liberal economy, but that economy itself, you know, is breaking down and it’s gonna take, it may take a long time to break down, but if you bring the breakdown on the problems together, if you if you actually find a problem which is a consequence of a breakdown, then you got a possibility of intervention that enables you to constitute an autonomous practice.
Again, because of my work on cities, I’ll give you an example. So, many cities have leftover spaces, spaces that are too small to build a conventional building on two awkward a size, so you can actually create a map of the city just with leftover spaces. Equally most cities have a problem of unemployment, particularly of young people, so how can you start to think about putting young people together with leftover spaces to create temporary structures that allow them to develop an economic activity. So that is still existing within the existing economy, but what it’s doing is creating a situation where people can take an initiative and take responsibility for their own economic activity. So you know again, an example of that people making [….] food carts. On the one hand you know a food cart is a bit of a micro economy that allows you to make and sell food, but the making of carts is a micro economy. So you could create a making of carts in a leftover space. That will create interest on the marketing of cards to the people who are trying to find an economic way of surviving. That’s a very schematic way of providing an example, but what I’m saying is it is possible to find ways for people to take their own economic faith into their own hands without having a huge amount of capital.
Q: So it is entirely up to us designers. It’s a question of developing counter entrepreneurship entrepreneurship Isn’t simply about accumulation about economic activity that the social transformation of practice these areas we have another question with two questions from another person in the audience who we would like to add to ask the first question is some design practices such as speculative design question the relation that design has with the future and its role in shaping it. How do you see those practices in regards or in comparison to the future
OK, the question turns on how we view the future so I do not view the future as big. I view the future as an obstacle course full of things that the past and the present of thrown into so navigating the future is navigating our way through over those obstacles , sometimes redirecting and transforming them sometimes destroying because many of the things that we have required to be eliminated by design, so the notion of speculative design in itself is not a practice that you warrant positive or negative judgment it entirely depends upon the epistemological foundation of speculation so what kind of knowledge you’re bringing Speculation so I’ve been working on that. I’m working on what I’m calling second order design sections, which is predicated upon speculation coming from speculative reason which comes from the whitehead so what I’m saying, the answer the question entirely depends on how you understand the future and how you understand speculation, and in terms of the future, that requires you to have an understanding of the consequences of what you’re trying to bring into existence by design by by speculation, so that requires a kind of reflective critical practice examination so all I’ve done is I’ve made it much more complicated so we have another two questions questions one is could you elaborate on the link you mentioned that the beginning of your talk between imagination, prefiguration, future and design and more specifically how design and imaginary influence each each other, and the rest of The most important thing to say about imagination is that it isn’t which is kind of fixed as a automatically mobilizing quality of mine imagination is something which is conjunction, environmentally historically specific so imagination differs according to time place circumstances it also is indivisible from the kind of the input that you require from the world I can give you a very simple example for four years I directed a project into working with young people most of them are Had very little formal education, and at the same time weren’t exposed to the kind of fast array of images that privileged young people in wealthier countries are supposed to the same time.
I was also professor teaching at a design school one of the things that was very clear with these students in this condition of underprivilege were far more creative and imaginative than these students in the condition of privilege, because their imagination was simply drawing from the visual materiality of their environment, so they constructed things by a process of bricolage from that repertoire of imagery that inhabited their mind. Whereas the students in (name of a city) drew their imagery from the culture that they existed in, from the environment that they existed in, a totally different way. So these two groups of young people had very different kinds of imagination. So imagination is something that we can create. It isn’t something which is innate. So if we change what we know, then change what we expose ourselves to, we can change our imagination.
It is absolutely fantastic so we’ll finish with a very last. Someone that wants you to come back on the dimension that changing ontological comprehension was easier than changing the conscious consciousness of a whole population could you elaborate yes Change is predicated upon the designing of the environment and the elements in that environment in place yourselves or place others what I just describe when we were talking about imagination words that in order to transform your imagination, you need to transform the environment that you insert yourself into the constitute imagination you need you need to expose yourself to other words you need to expose yourself to a different ontological conditions to create an ontological transformation You can see, but that has a practical potential change, but if you can’t compare that to the challenge of transforming some imagination by trying to raise their consciousness of the significance of imagination, even if you do that, you haven’t necessarily change their imagination, so the most important thing to understand about relation between change and oncology goes to what I said wrong that everything that we bring into existence by design goes on designing, and the implication of that for the designer is what they have to be able to learn to do brings into existence by design goes on designing, and the implication of that for the designer is what they have to be able to learn to do it not to just see what they break into existence by design, but to be able to understand the consequences of what they’re bringing into existence as a designing so you have to be able to gain your ability to understand the design of what you design thank you so much it was it was wonderful. I think it’s a perfect conclusion to you were talk and you can now have a well deserved night of rest. Thank you so much for joining on that weird time shift table!