4: An Outline of Ontological Design

The empire consists of postulating that the hic et nunc [place-­based, face-t­o-­face existence] is in the past and that only interactivity remains. Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear

The idea of ontological designing is gathering momentum, yet, to date, it has not been addressed front-­on. [[Anne-­Marie Willis]], “Ontological Designing—­Laying the Ground”

==We encounter the deep question of design when we recognize that in designing tools we are designing ways of being.== Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition

So you are holding a digital device in your hand, maybe even while you read ­these pages. Do you know what it is? How it un/does you in par­tic­ul­ar ways? How it un/does the world? ­Here is American rapper Prince Ea’s passionate plea that we think about it deeply, one might say ontologically:1

Do you know the average person spends four years of his life looking down at a cell phone? Kind of ironic, ­ain’t it? How ­these touch-s­creens can make us lose touch. With so many iMacs, iPads, and iPhones, so many “i”s, so many selfies Not enough “us”s and “we”s See, technology has made us more selfish and separate than ever ‘Cause while it claims to connect us, connection has gotten no better… Reclassify Facebook for what it is, an antisocial network… We sit at home on our computers mea­sur­ing self-­worth in terms of numbers of followers and likes… What about me? Do we not have the patience to have a cnvrstn without abbrvtn? This is the generation of media over stimulation Chats have become reduced to snaps, the news is 140 characters, videos of six seconds at high speed, and you won­der why ADD [attention deficit disorder] is on the rise faster than 4g LTE… This one, my friends, we cannot autocorrect, we must do it ourselves. Take control or be controlled, Make a decision… I am so tired of conforming…to this accepted form of digital insanity… I imagine a world where we smile when we have low batteries, ‘Cause that ­will mean w­e’ll be one bar closer—to humanity.

Let me reassure you at the outset that it is not a question of being for or against technology, or even of settling the score on the alleged ­battle between tradition and modernity, but rather of bringing to the fore the diversity of existential options open to us ­humans, the multiple ways of being in space/place and time, and of what technologies do to the Earth and to our communities. Prince Ea’s slow, carefully worded rapping makes us aware of the anthropological narrowing of existential choices fostered by t­hings digital, paradoxically in the name of freedom, the carefully regulated freedom of neoliberal self-improvement schemes, of the seductive “Be All You Can Be” slogan, which translates as “maximize your interactions, your connectivity, the information you upload into your devices so as to download it again when useful.” But it is in so striving to be ­free that we are, paradoxically, most programmed, most effectively compelled to be and act in par­tic­u­lar ways, to conform to the norm of being “­free.”

What would it mean, then, to be “one bar closer to humanity”? The question is not as ­simple as it seems; it demands digging deep into the cultural and material background of the seemingly simple act, but actually complex cultural-historical fact, of using a digital device. The media discourse about the digital era is perhaps the best place to start the digging, for it is deeply rooted in modern technological society. According to popu­lar understanding, what’s most exciting about our increasingly ubiquitous digital devices is the revolution of sorts in communication, information, and interactivity they brought about.2 Unpacking fully the meaning of communications, information, and interaction== is beyond the scope of this short introduction, but it should be clear by now to the ontologically minded reader that the background for understanding ==­these notions involves fundamental assumptions about the nature of language, the individual, pro­gress, and life itself==. In other words, ==underl­ying ­these constructs ­there lies the Cartesian/Euclidean onto-­epistemology of ind­e­pen­dent entities that preexist any interaction, of information as made up of discrete and truthful accounts of an objectively existing real, of a world made up of objects that language only denotes but does not help to construct, of rules of logic and forms of rationality benignly intended to make the world a decent and livable place (which are not the result of the mind-­set of hyperracist white wealthy politicians with their repeated calls for “security” and “law and order”).

This is not to forget that the data on your computer or slick mobile phone depend on the bits of cobalt, gallium, indium, tantalum, platinum, palladium, niobium, lithium, germanium, and so forth lodged in them; that, more than fancy-­sounding Latin names, ­these materials are bits of Africa for sure, sometimes from South Amer­ic­a, perhaps from eastern Congo with its bloody wars and brutal forms of eviction of locals to secure a steady supply of t­hese “conflict minerals”; and that ­these wars create thousands of victims, including through the abuse of young w­omen, and that they are connected to the devastation of forests and rivers, not to speak of the e-­waste created by hundreds of millions of discarded screens, mobile devices, and computers that thousands of poor ­people in China or elsewhere scavenge for any bit of value left in them, u­nder the most hazardous conditions, ­because the waste of some is the opportunity of ­others, right? And let us not overlook ­either the fact that ­these minerals are ­housed in geological strata, in a “metallic materiality” that summons cap­it­al­ists to perform patriarchal alchemy at ever-h­igher levels, since corporations have come to believe that they can bend the Earth into any form or shape, so that even the geological time of our planet, embedded in deep layers of rock, comes to be disturbed, a resource at the ser­vice of our small but power­ful machines.3 What this means is that we impose the Judeo-­Christian linear time (of salvation and pro­gress) on allegedly inert geological strata, which perhaps explains why the Earth is screaming, as Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff has been telling us for de­cades, most purposely in his book O grito da Terra, o grito dos pobres (Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor; 1997).

Of course, we can venture farther back in order to recall that ­today’s digital devices rely on those discoveries in solid-­state physics that gave rise to transistors, semiconductors, microchips, and integrated cir­cuits at the dawn of the digital revolution, to the steady miniaturization that made Silicon Valley explode with possibilities and unbridled cele­brations, b­ubbles, hype, and disappointments, so that slowly but surely we awaken to the ineluctable realization of the colonialist, bloody links among Silicon Valley, Africa, and dramatically underpaid Chinese workers (surely part of Steve Jobs’s much-­celebrated “genius”). We end up with the complex geo-­ontological formation that Benjamin Bratton (2014) calls the Stack, wherein rests the entire po­litical geology of con­temporary media and information and communication technologies, and it should make us ponder what are we doing, ­really, with our fanciest tools, which many of us have come to think we can no longer live without.

There is more. Also implicit in Prince Ea’s narrative is the displacement of copresence by telepresence, of face-t­o-­face relations by relations with distant ­others. But you might say: d­oesn’t life become more exciting this way? Fair enough. Nonetheless, as the philosopher-a­rchitect Paul Virilio—by his own acknowle­dgment not a prophet of doom but a true lover of new technologies (1999, 13)—­asks, “How can we r­eally live if t­here is no more ­here and if everything is now? (1997, 37).4 Surely being f­ree from place and time represents ­human pro­gress, one might argue. Yet as we plug in to our vario­us interfaces and engage in tele-­existence, as we become citizen-­terminals of sorts, our bodies are deterritorialized, as in the cyberpunk fantasies of the 1980s, when cyberspace became a meta­phor for anything that was cool.5 Alienated from place, our only recourse is to maximize speed ­under the tyranny of real-­time transmission, trapped in the utopia of the annihilation of duration, of being involved in as many ­things as pos­si­ble at the same time, all the time. Corresponding to ­these changes at the level of subjectivity ­there are transformations at aggregate levels, including the temporal homogenization of the planet, the imposition of the infosphere on the biosphere, of bytes over bio, a new cybernetics of control that even WikiLeaks can never hope to diffuse. And so we succumb, too, to a global environment of fear (the fear of the terrorist, or of natu­ral disasters) propagated by real-t­ime media, to the “synchronization of emotion on a global scale” (Virilio 2012, 30), and that’s how our emotional territories get occupied. Yet, “So what?,” you might still ask. And I respond: would the losses caused by all t­hese technocultural changes not outnumber the gains? How would one even know? And one might add: are the rematerialization of the body and the reterritorialization of place still pos­si­ble? Or are they already historically foreclosed possibilities?

Let me insist that it is r­eally not a question of making value judgments about what’s better or worse, but of conveying a sense of why it is critically impor­tant that we ask the questions. I do not have a Facebook account; I d­on’t tweet, and I d­on’t even own a smartphone (sometimes I say, jokingly, that my old-­fashioned cell phone is the smartest since it d­oesn’t let me get text messages I ­don’t want to read, beeps I ­don’t want to hear, “connections” I’d prefer not to have). I do not claim in the least bit to be a better person than t­hose spending four hours a day on their cell phones. That would be hypocritical of me, for a­fter all I’ve spent countless hours at a screen just writing this book. At the same time, what difference does it make in terms of my style of being ­human, or posthuman? This question is part and parcel of the historical ontology of ourselves, of what makes us who we are at pres­ent.

So, do you now see why ontology—­actually, po­litic­al ontology—is impor­tant? Can design contribute to fulfilling the historic, perhaps vital, task of catalyzing forms of collective intelligence that attend to the kinds of choices confronting us, including design’s own role in creating them?

Recasting the question concerning new technologies ontologically is certainly not an issue of total rejection but a redirection of the cultural tradition from which they stemmed. Modern socie­ties are already thoroughly theoretically driven. By this I mean that expert knowledges have a profound influence on how we live our lives. In so many domains of life, from eating our food (mediated by nutritional knowledge, including our food fears) and child-­rearing practices (mediated by the pediatric, psychological, and health establishments with their battery of experts) to thinking about the economy, we make daily choices based on rational judgment mediated by expert discourses. Our daily real­ity is textually mediated and produced by all kinds of expert categories, including their unfailing deployment by the media. How this tradition shapes design practice ­will be further developed in this chapter by taking the ontological argument proposed by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores as a point of departure.

The first section introduces the notion of ontological design as originally outlined by Winograd and Flores. We then move in the second part to discuss recent ontological approaches to design, particularly the work of Tony Fry and his collaborators. While he does not engage with Winograd and Flores directly, Fry’s approach is consistent with ­these authors’ formulation, as they share some sources, particularly Heideggerian phenomenology and analy­sis of technology. Together, ­these works constitute a foundation for evolving approaches to the ontology of design. The last part of the chapter deals with another impor­tant question posed by Francisco Varela in the third lecture in his short book Ethical Know-­How: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition (1999): ­whether nondualist attitudes can be fostered in Western cultures. This reflection w­ill open the way for a discussion of transitions and design for transitions, to be discussed in the following chapter.

What Is Ontological Design?

Why should design be considered “ontological”? The initial answer to this question is straightforward: “We encounter the deep question of design when we recognize that in designing tools we are designing ways of being” (Winograd and Flores 1986, xi). Understood as “the interaction between understanding and creation” (4), design is ontological in that it is a conversation about possibilities. One more way to get at the ontological dimension of design is by addressing “the broader question of how a society engenders inventions whose existence in turn alters that society” (4-5). Digital technologies are of course dramatic cases of radical innovations that opened up unpre­ce­dented domains of possibilities (as were printing, the automobile, and tele­vi­sion earlier); they transformed an entire set of daily practices. Thus, ­every tool or technology is ontological in the sense that, however humbly or minutely, it inaugurates a set of rituals, ways of ­doing, and modes of being (Escobar 1994). It contributes to shaping what it is to be ­human.

A second sense in which design is ontological, already hinted at by Winograd and Flores, is that, in designing tools, we (­humans) design the conditions of our existence and, in turn, the conditions of our designing. We design tools, and t­hese tools design us back. “Design designs” is the apt and short formula given to this circularity by Anne-­Marie Willis; “we design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us” (2006, 80). This applies to the entire range of objects, tools, institutions, and discourses of ­human creation, no ­matter how neutral we consider them. Can t­here be anything more seemingly neutral than a space of habitation, a container for the body? I often give the example of the Amazonian indigenous maloca (indigenous long­house) versus the archetypical nuclear-­family ­house in suburban Amer­i­ca. The maloca can ­house several dozen ­people ­under a single roof, even if the act of habitation obeys certain rules of be­hav­ior and spatial distribution. As I jokingly say, paraphrasing, “give me a maloca, and I w­ill raise a relational world” (including the integral and interdependent relations between ­humans and nonhumans); conversely, give me a suburban home, and I w­ill raise a world of decommunalized individuals, separated from the natur­al world. Design thus inevitably generates ­humans’ (and other Earth beings’) structures of possibility.

It is Winograd and Flores’s contention that the pervasive way in which we think about technology, coming from the rationalistic tradition, not only constitutes the implicit understanding of design but makes it difficult, if not impossible, to come up with new approaches to the design of machines that are better suited to ­human purposes; it also becomes an obstacle to the creation of the open domains of possibility enabled by computer-­mediated networks of ­human interaction. The rationalistic tradition traps our imagination through constraining meta­phors such as that of computers as brains or mere information-­processing devices, and that of language as a medium for the transmission of information (see Dreyfus 1979 for a critique of artificial intelligence from this perspective). In unconcealing that tradition, ­these authors aim at a redirection rather than a debunking of the tradition, but the goal of the redirection is substantial: “to develop a new ground for rationality—o­ne that is as rigorous as the rationalistic tradition but that does not share the presuppositions ­behind it” (Winograd and Flores 1986, 8).6

To this end they weave together theories of biological life (Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela 1980, 1987), phenomenological frameworks about knowledge and h­uman action (Martin Heidegger 1962, 1977; Hans-­Georg Gadamer 1975), and philosophy of language (the theory of speech acts). From ­these fields come the conceptual pillars of their framework: the notion that cognition is not based on the manipulation of knowledge about an objective world; that the observer is not separate from the world she or he observes but rather creates the phenomenal domains within which she or he acts; and that the world is created through language (again, language is not a mere translation or repre­sen­ta­tion of real­ity “out there” but is constitutive of such real­ity, a point underscored by semiology and poststructuralist theory). Similar to the Indian critics of science discussed earlier, Winograd and Flores find a deep connection between the rationalistic tradition and or­ga­nized science, a fact that mars understanding in a host of domains, from cognitive science to policy making and even citizenship, entrepreneurship, and activism (Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus 1997). The mind-­body dualism that posits the existence of two separate domains—t­he objective world of physical real­ity and the individual’s subjective ­mental world—is of course one of their targets. Against such a dualism, they uphold the fundamental unity of being-i­n-­the-­world, the primacy of practical understanding, and the idea of cognition as enaction.

The background is thus the space of possibilities within which h­umans act and express their “care” for the world. “This world is always or­ga­nized around fundamental ­human proj­ects, and depends upon t­hese proj­ects for its being and organ­ization” (Winograd and Flores 1986, 58). The Cartesian notion of modern subjects in control of an objective world, as much as that of the “flexible” postmodern subject surfing the web, does not, in their view, provide a good basis for the ontological skill of disclosing new ways of being (see Dreyfus and Kelly 2011 for a similar point). This ontological skill of history making—engaging in conversations and interventions that change the ways in which we deal with ourselves and ­things—­can be enlivened, as Flores and coauthors Charles Spinosa and Hubert Dreyfus examine in detail in a subsequent work (Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus 1997). Rather than the proverbial detached deliberation or desituated understanding characteristic of the public sphere, the skillful disclosing of new worlds demands intense involvement with a collectivity. It requires a dif­fer­ent sort of attitude that comes from dwelling in a place and from a commitment to a community with which we engage in pragmatic activity around a shared concern, or around a disharmony. In ­these notions we can already sense the idea that the designer might be a discloser in this sense; moreover, the designer shows awareness that she or he is a discloser. It is also ­these authors’ contention that while this kind of history making has declined in the West, it is by no means completely lost—again, it is a capacity that needs to be retrieved, and I contend that design is a means to this retrieval (Dreyfus and Kelly 2011; Dreyfus 2014).

Ontological Design as Conversations for Action

It should be stressed that, as for Varela, for Winograd and Flores the entire pro­cess is deeply practice oriented. Sensing and holding on to a disharmony in one’s disclosive space is not effectively achieved by stepping back from the prob­lem in order to analyze it; on the contrary, when meaningful change is needed, “then disharmonies ­will be of the non-­standard situational kind that is usually passed over by both common sense and [abstract] theory,” and in ­these cases what is required is intense engagement and involved experimentation (Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus 1997, 23-24).7 This resonates with a design philosophy that emphasizes the engaged, experimental, and open-­ended practices of design research, including prototyping and scenario building. Winograd and Flores convey this same idea by talking about “breakdowns” rather than “prob­lems,” at least in the way the latter are discussed in the rationalistic tradition. Breakdowns are moments in which the habitual mode of being-­in-­the-­world is interrupted; when a breakdown happens, our customary practices and the role of our tools in maintaining them are exposed, and new design solutions appear and are created; we can intuitively feel the appropriateness of this notion for the myriad cases of ecological breakdown in con­temporary situations.

It should be emphasized, at the risk of being repetitive, that t­hese authors insist that both the disclosing activity and the act of dealing with breakdowns imply g­oing beyond the commonly held idea that the world functions in terms of individual m­ental repre­sen­ta­tions of a prob­lem, ­toward a social perspective of patterned, embedded interaction—­that is, a perspective that highlights our active participation in domains of mutual concern. Moreover, all of this takes place through language: “To put it in a more radical form, we design ourselves (and the social and technological networks in which our lives have meaning) in language” (Winograd and Flores 1986, 78); or, to return to Maturana, “languaging” is the fundamental manner of existence of ­human beings; not only that, but language is intimately connected with the flow of emotions, as languaging and “emotioning” together provide the basis for the recursive coordination of be­hav­ior through the creation of consensual domains. Maturana calls “the consensual braiding of language and emotions, conversation” (1997, 9; see also Maturana and Verden-­Zöller 2008).

It should be made clear that ­these authors are not saying that we need to get rid of detached modes of knowing in toto, nor that repre­sen­ta­tions are not impor­tant. As they put it, “­human cognition includes the use of repre­sen­ta­tions, but it is not based on repre­sen­ta­tion” (Winograd and Flores 1986, 99). Similarly, Varela, in stressing the importance of “know-h­ow” (which he says has predominated in the wisdom traditions, such as Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism), as opposed to the Cartesian “know-­what,” is not minimizing the importance of rational analy­sis but highlighting the salience of concrete, localized forms of ethical expertise based on nondual action for ordinary life, which moderns usually disregard. ­These notions reveal the assumed one-to-­one correspondence between language and real­ity, repre­sen­ta­tion and the real, which takes us back to the questions of, Which “world”? What “design”? What “real”? The answer, as should be clear by now, points well beyond the objectivist, dualist, and detached understandings of world, design, and real. How can we rethink design on the basis of the reformed understanding of ­these notions?

For Winograd and Flores, the answer to this question necessitates a rethinking of organ­izations and their management. True, while a g­reat deal of what man­ag­ers do conforms to well-­known rational decision-­making routines as described in systems analys­is, remaining at this level narrows the field of possibilities. To start with, a ­great deal of what man­ag­ers do daily is to respond actively and concernfully to daily situations in order to secure effective cooperative action. In doing so, man­ag­ers can be seen as activating networks of commitments; from this perspective, more generally, organ­izations constitute conversations for action; there is a certain degree of recurrence and formalization in ­these conversations, which Winograd and Flores characterize in terms of distinct linguistic acts. Organi­zations are networks of commitments that operate through linguistic acts such as promises and requests. In the end, the central feature of organi­zations and their design is the development of communicative competence within an open-­ended domain for interpretation in ways that make commitments transparent:

Communicative competence means the capacity to express one’s intuitions and take responsibilities in the networks of commitments that utterances and their interpretations bring to the world. In their day-­to-­day being, ­people are generally not aware of what they are ­doing. They are simply working, speaking, ­etc., more or less blind to the pervasiveness of the essential dimension of commitment. Consequently, there exists a domain for education in communicative competence: the fundamental relationships between language and successful action. ­People’s conscious knowledge of their participation in the network of commitments can be reinforced and developed, improving their capacity to act in the domain of language. (1986, 162)8

It could be argued that this approach leans on a rationalistic understanding of reflection, and to some extent this is the case. However, it is also a departure from it based on the implication of cognition as enaction, as spelled out by Maturana and Varela: “Since all cognition brings forth a world, our starting point will necessarily be the operational effectiveness of living beings in their domain of existence…[Effective action] enables a living being to continue its existence in a definite environment as it brings forth its world. Nothing more, nothing less” (1987, 29-30; emphasis added). There are two corollaries of importance ­here for an ontological approach to design that ­will be explored more fully ­later on: first, the need to make explicit our de facto ontological commitment to a modernist epistemology and ontology of subjects and objects (made up, to reiterate, of discrete “individuals” operating on the basis of “true (detached) knowledge” about “­really existing” economies, and so forth); and, second, the question of w­hether dif­fer­ent ontological commitments, based on a relational understanding, are pos­si­ble.

Operational effectiveness is of course a key issue for the design of tools, including computers; it is conveyed through the concept of transparency of interaction, and interfaces are crucial in this regard. ­Here again Winograd and Flores warn that interfaces are not best achieved by mimicking human faculties but that tools’ “readiness-t­o-­hand” requires thinking more complexly about the right coupling of user and tool within the space of relevant domains. A sort of interface anthropology is at issue here (Laurel 1989; Suchman 2007). Building on the work of Mexican designer Tomás Maldonado, the Argentinean designer Silvia Austerlic (1997) speaks about the ontological structure of design as made up of the interrelations among tool, user, and task or purpose, all of which are brought together by the interface. The German-­Chilean design theorist Gui Bonsiepe (2000) has coined the term audiovisualistics as a way to point at the cognitive complexity involved in interface design from the perspective of operational effectiveness.

Breakdowns are central to Winograd and Flores’s notion of design. As a situation of “nonobviousness,” a breakdown is not something negative but provides the space of possibility for action—­for creating domains where new conversations and connections can take place. Breakdowns can be anticipated to a certain extent, but they mostly arise in practice, calling for a back-­and-­forth between design and experience; the building of prototypes can facilitate this task by helping to generate the relevant domains for anticipating breakdowns and dealing with them when they emerge (1986, 171). This also means that a key aspect of design is the creation through language of the domains in which ­people’s actions are generated and interpreted. This is a main princip­le of user-­centered design, and ­today it would include taking into account the design of context, and the user’s own design, as discussed in chapter 1. If we think about the ecological crisis as characterized by a recurrent pattern of breakdowns, what is at stake is the creation of systematic domains where definitions and rules can be re/defined in ways that make visi­­ble interdependencies and commitments (or the lack thereof). This is dif­fer­ent from the concept of expert systems as the design of professionally oriented domains, which are unlikely to foster the kinds of conversation for action that are needed to face the crisis. In designing changes in p­eople’s space of interactions, the goal of the ecological designer is to trigger changes in individual and collective orientations, that is, changes in the horizon that shapes understanding, a point to be discussed further when we take up the notion of sustainability again.

Toward the end of their book, Winograd and Flores summarize ­these princi­ples:

The most impor­tant design is ontological. It constitutes an intervention in the background of our heritage, growing out of our already-­existent ways of being in the world, and deeply affecting the kinds of beings that we are.In creating new artifacts, equipment, buildings, and orga­nizational structures, it attempts to specify in advance how and where breakdowns w­ill show up in our everyday practices and in the tools we use, opening up new spaces in which we can work and play. Ontologically oriented design is therefore necessarily both reflective and po­liti­cal, looking back to the traditions that have formed us but also forwards to as-­yet-­uncreated trans formations of our lives together. Through the emergence of new tools, we come to a changing awareness of ­human nature and h­uman action, which in turn leads to new technological development. The designing pro­cess is part of this “dance” in which our structure of possibilities is generated. (1986, 163)

“In ontological designing,” to quote them one final time, “we are ­doing more than asking what can be built. We are engaging in a philosophical discourse about the self—a­bout what we can do and what can be. Tools are fundamental to action, and through our actions we generate the world. The transformation we are concerned with is not a technical one, but a continuing evolution of how we understand our surroundings and ourselves—of how we continue becoming the beings we are” (179; emphasis added). In subsequent chapters we ­will prod this perspective into a nondualist path by focusing explic­itly on the communal and pondering how to transition beyond the rationalistic tradition whose pervasiveness Winograd and Flores do so much to unconceal.

Becoming ­Human by Design

Most ­people would intuitively reject the idea that we h­umans, too, are designed in some fashion. Yet this is one of the most direct and consequential lessons of the ontological approach to design. To paraphrase, in modern socie­ties we design ourselves, although not ­under conditions of our own choosing. From the resulting allegedly universal but specifically modern notion of the h­uman now emerges the imperative to transcend its anthropocentric, androcentric, and rationalistic foundations, which has yielded an entire spectrum of posthumanist approaches, some of which ­were discussed at the end of chapter 2.

Fry’s design ontology (Fry 2011, 2012, 2015; Fry, Dilnot, and Stewart 2015) can be considered a special case within the posthumanist landscape, for several reasons: first, it is to my knowledge the first and only approach to systematically link posthumanism and design; and, second, concomitantly, it makes a deci­ded effort at crafting a posthumanist notion of the ­human, one that tackles systematically the consequences of living ­under structured unsustainability as a civilizational condition. What, Fry asks, “has been lost in the rise of the hegemonic category ‘the ­human’?” (2012, 12). Fry reminds us that the ­human is the result of three ­great forces: natur­al se­lection, self-­organization, and design.9 This evolutionary view allows Fry to signal the uniqueness of the leap ­toward unsustainability entailed by modernity. This is a third impor­tant feature of the work of Fry and his collaborators, namely, their willingness to imagine beyond modernity, and to do so decolonially, that is, with a profound awareness that one of the most impor­tant design consequences of modernity has been the systematic suppression, and not infrequently destruction, of nonmodern worlds. “Writ large,” Fry states, “[modernity] did not just take the ­future away from the ­peoples it damaged and exploited but set a pro­cess in motion that negated the ­future, and defutured both the born and the unborn” (2015, 23). Thinking decolonially indicates a critique of the notion of a world made of One World and, conversely, upholds the notion that “while the planet is singular, world is plural—for it is formed and seen in difference—as are we” (21). The sensitivity to difference is crucial ­here, since it refers to the pluriverse and contributes to the argument that what needs to be sustained is precisely the pluriverse.10

For Fry, one of the most serious effects of modernity is what he calls defuturing, understood as the systematic destruction of pos­si­ble f­utures by the structured unsustainability of modernity. Futuring, in contrast, is intended to convey the opposite: a ­future with ­futures. The tension between defuturing and futuring is one way used by Fry to suggest a move from the Enlightenment to the “Sustainment,” a new imaginary for an age (in the Heideggerian sense of age) where dif­fer­ent ways of thinking, being, and ­doing become pos­si­ble. For Fry, this transition is akin to that from the ancient to the modern world. The imperative for the move t­oward Sustainment stems from the need to c­ounter the defuturing effects inherent in the economies, cultures, and institutions of the con­temporary world, primarily their unquestioned attachment to economic growth. The Sustainment is prefigurative, as was the Enlightenment with its belief in universal reason and the imperative of order and pro­gress, no doubt the civilizational dream that is unraveling ­under our eyes.

The pervasive conditions of unsustainability and defuturing inherent to the reason-­centered culture that became entrenched with the passage to modernity must be destroyed as part of the reestablishment of futuring conditions. This dialectic of destruction and creation is part and parcel of Fry’s framework. Moving t­oward Sustainment calls for an explicit ethics of what to destroy and what to create, materially and symbolically. This is one of the princi­ples for the kinds of designing that need to go on ­under the dialectic of Sustainment; it involves destroying that which destroys (the unknowing and unthinking that produces unsustainability) and, at the same time, embracing the proj­ect of founding a new tradition capable of carry­ing the Sustainment forward. The former supposes an entire range of actions properly understood as “elimination design.” The latter requires disclosing the pos­si­ble ways of being-­in-t­he-­world that do not reenact unsustainability but rather enable acts of imagining, designing, and re/making that are auspicious for Sustainment. Unlike sustainable development, the green economy, or the liberal ethic of saving the planet—all of which continue to function within the defuturing ontology—­the Sustainment challenges us moderns to secure ­futures for the kinds of relational forms of being capable of countering the still-p­ervasive conditions of defuturing and unsustainability.

The Posthuman ­Human and the Artificial

The world modern h­umans have created is “deworlding” u­nder the pressures of globalized capitalism, population, and technology. The proj­ect of “reworlding” is thus necessarily ontological in that it involves eliminating or redesigning not just structures, technologies, and institutions but our very ways of thinking and being (Illich 1973). Perhaps one of the most daring, and puzzling, aspects of this task is Fry’s unapologetic call for redesigning the h­uman.

Simply put, if it is (certain) h­umans who are causing unsustainability, we have to redesign the ­human. Many modern thinkers ­will reasonably sense in the notion of redesigning the human the ugly ghosts of social engineering, sociobiology, or Foucauldian biopower—ahypermodernity at its worst. Yet Fry is careful to make clear that what he means is a posthuman and postrationalistic idea of the ­human. As he says, “We are travelling ­toward a point at which we ­will have to learn how to redesign ourselves. This is not as extreme as it sounds, for we have always been a product of design—­albeit unknowingly… In essence, what is being suggested here is action towards the relational development of a new kind of ‘­human being’” (2012, 37). The implication is that we need “to consider the ontologically designing forces that constitute subjects with diminished agency and the reverse: an ontologically designed subject beyond the subject” (162). As Cameron Tonkinwise ([2014?]) has explained, this goal does not mean that we are masters of our destiny, nor that we are able to design our existence at ­will. What it means is that we are historically thrown into our designedness, with par­tic­ul­ar acuity at pres­ent. This might actually be another connotation of the anthropocene. What Fry has in mind, to follow Tonkinwise’s argument, is in fact the opposite of “human-centered design” with its “timid [liberal] version of the ­human,” most often concerned with consumer desires and instrumental rationality (Tonkinwise 2014, 7). But “being by design” is not instrumental; it points at the fact that we exist in the space of our designing. Human-­centered design should thus not be confused with Fry’s idea of becoming ­human by design.

Equally impor­tant, Fry is adamant that, as the planet is confronted with the dramatic consequences of unsustainability and defuturing, such as climate change, the resources at hand—whether afforded by modernity or by traditions of any kind—are no longer appropriate to the task. No amount of evolutionary adaptation or natu­ral design ­will do. On the contrary, what is required is the design of novel ontologically futuring practices that take us decidedly into the dialectic of Sustainment, beyond the “world-within-­the-world” of modern colonialist making, by means of re/makings that radically transform ­humans’ tendency ­toward the unsustainable. This implicates an anthropogenesis that rearticulates the relational assemblages of the biological (­humans’ animality), the sociocultural, and the technical. Fry makes clear that for him ­humans ­today are constituted within a naturalized artificial ecol­ogy created through design and technics; this means that nature becomes a “standing reserve” to be appropriated, thus unknowingly making the world we create a negation of the biophysical world of our absolute dependence. This rate of change, he concludes (2012, 61), “has come to override evolutionary time,” thus “the need for humans to adapt has become ever more urgent. But now the only available option is to adapt by artificial means. Survival will thus now become a biosocial ontological design proj­ect…R ather than pose the adaptation in the human/animal frame, we must place it in the context of the relation between the ­human and the artificial.” In this way Fry takes us back to the brief discussion in the introduction about design and the f­uture. It would be pertinent to ask ­whether Fry succeeds in articulating a view of the f­uture dif­fer­ent from that of the techno-­fathers of geoengineering, synthetic biology, the great singularity, and the like; in other words, whether his proposal gains sufficient distance from the ontology of appropriation and control that so naturally inhabits the techno-­futurist visions related to the artificial. While, for Fry, ­humans became prosthetic beings with the invention of the first tools, from the rise of modernity onward the ontological designing of the body/tool/mind assemblage has resulted in a “world-within-­the-world” that has naturalized the artificial dimension of human evolution. For Fry, this means that modern ­humans are inescapably anthropocentric.

Rather than posit a radical way out of this anthropocentrism, Fry calls for a self-­conscious and responsible anthropocentrism that, by necessity, has to invent its own posthuman notion of the ­human. Evolution in the anthropocene thus needs to be properly understood in terms of natural se­lection, self-organization, and ontological design. This is partially at odds with ­those proposals in the ecological design field that give primacy to the organic integration of ­humans and nature but resonates with the calls to embrace critically the possibilities afforded by con­temporary technology found among feminist scholars in the field of science and technology studies (such as Donna Haraway). Despite Fry’s rejection of a strict biocentric ethic (e.g., 2015, 57), not anything goes, since design-­as-­adaptation nevertheless has to take into account the self-organizing dynamics of the Earth. In any case, it ­will remain pending until the conclusion of this book ­whether Fry (and this book itself) escapes the ontology of enframing and proj­ect orientation that ­today’s rising ethic of the artificial seems to deploy with such force.

The results of the modernist ontological design journey, and the very complexity of the agency of what designs us, can be seen most patently in cities. We referred in passing (chapter 2) to “the question of finding futural modes of [urban] dwelling” (Fry 2015, 87), and we can now return to this notion to conclude this section. Fry locates this question within a large-­scale history of earthly habitation, which shifted from nomadism to settlement with farming about ten thousand years ago. In order to envision f­utures with a f­uture, a third mode of ­human habitation has to be recognized and actively re/shaped, which Fry calls unsettlement. Despite the dramatic changes in urban habitation, settlement is still the default framework in city planning and in discussions of climate change adaptation, as if we were still dealing with the modernist city. But mass mobility and climate change have thrown the situation into an altogether dif­fer­ent mode and scale. We can expect abandoned cities, pervasive riots and conflict related to food and the climate, mass deaths, fierce struggles for survival, and all kinds of human-­induced disasters as that “world-­within-the-world” par excellence that is the modern city unravels ­under the effects of climate change. Exposing the instability of this mode of habitation—including modernity’s misformed and misplaced cities, and the homelessness and structural unsustainability characteristic of the afterlife of the modern city—is the first task of an ontological design strategy concerned with earthly habitation:

We are “thrown” into ­these defuturing conditions as the ­future is sacrificed to the hollow gains of the pres­ent…The continuity of this relation is at the heart of Sustainment—t­he conceptual and practical proj­ect beyond the Enlightenment, modernity, globalism, and sustainability (which so often sustains the unsustainable—be it industries, ways of life, products, institutions, built environments, modes of agriculture, and more). All of this adds up to the making of a world of being-­in-­difference. A post-­human world (again in its difference) is demanded wherein the ­human is not abandoned but rather becomes in tune with the being of Sustainment, and so becomes a futural agent. (Fry 2015, 32)

The practical aspects of rethinking urban design and adaptation are huge and encompass all dimensions of the space and time of the city; Fry explores them at length in City ­Futures in the Age of a Changing Climate (2015).11 Learning how to dwell in another way will bring with it a sharper recognition of what we (modern humans) actually are, so that we can be other­wise. Fry maps an entire cultural-political proj­ect that involves “embracing the ontological status of the city assemblage as post-­natural environments of difference together with regimes of ordering and disordering (the formal and the informal, the informational and metabolic, the industrial and post-­industrial, the spectacular and hidden)…It follows that a very dif­fer­ent view of post-urbanism is now to be put forward ­here” (88), one that makes pos­si­ble futural modes of dwelling.

Sustainability by Design?

This is a good point to bring back the question of sustainability, this time from an explic­itly ontological perspective. Imbued with the major tenets of Heideggerian phenomenology and Maturana’s biology, a recent approach to sustainability by John Ehrenfeld develops an ontological framework for ecological design.12 Ehrenfeld (2009) starts by arguing that current proposals ­will at best amount to reducing unsustainability rather than creating true sustainability. For the latter to happen, a veritable reinvention of the collective structures that shape our lives and that define our humanness is required. Briefly, in Ehrenfeld’s diagnosis, unsustainability springs from the cultural structure of modernity itself. Moreover, approaches intended to deal with environmental prob­lems are based on a reductionist definition of the prob­lem that in turn stems from the narrow understanding of real­ity, rationality, and technology inherited from the Cartesian tradition. This is causing tremendous breakdowns in not only ecological but also social life, which the author interprets in terms of addiction to consumption. From here he goes on to propose a framework for the redesign of tools, physical infrastructure, and social institutions as a means to foster changes in consciousness and practices based on an ontology of care. The framework revisits the intersection of three domains—­the ­human, the natural, and the ethical—as the space for an alternative approach to sustainability.

From ­these initial steps follows the definition of sustainability as “the possibility that ­humans and other life ­will flourish on the planet forever” (Ehrenfeld 2009, 53; italics in the original). In this vision, flourishing, following various philosophical and spiritual sources, “is the most basic foundation of ­human striving and, if properly articulated, can be the strongest pos­si­ble driver t­owards sustainability” (53). Flourishing, he goes on to propose, can be brought about only by shifting to a design mode that is effective at dealing with the culture of unsustainability—in other words, the way out can be no other than sustainability by design (76-77). This is one of Ehrenfeld’s stronger contentions, the second being that what needs to be transformed first and foremost, given their overwhelming power, are the economic and technological domains that sustain the modern ontology. This does not mean that the key to sustainability is to be found in scientific breakthroughs or techno-­fixes but rather that “the key to sustainability is the practical truths that each of us discovers in our daily life and that contribute to the collective activities of our culture” (95).

How, then, can one design a world that brings forth flourishing in everyday activities? Can cultural practices be changed by design? Echoing pragmatists’ understanding ( John Dewey and Charles Pearce), Ehrenfeld makes the bold claim that this can indeed be done—“­devices” can be designed to gradually transform our primary mode of understanding and being. This conclusion comes close to Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert Dreyfus’s (1997) notion of history making and relies on a par­tic­u­lar articulation of the notion of care (for self, ­others, and the world), arguing that care can be structured into the design of tools and equipment through “presencing.” Key to presencing (a concept similar to the hoped-­for “ready-t­o-­hand” character of technological interfaces) is the incorporation into tools of ecological habits through design so as to transform routine actions into forms of ecological behav­ior; this is to be achieved by embedding “scripts” into product design. Designers, in this way, would need to go well beyond the goal of satisfying users’ needs, to articulate the concerns of a collectivity in novel ways. New embodied routines slowly become collective, eventually transforming social consciousness and institutional structures.13

Generally speaking, what is at play in this proposal is the emphasis in recent design thinking on “making t­hings effective and meaningful” through convivial solutions arrived at via the princi­ple of use-­centered effectiveness (Manzini 2015). As Tonkinwise likes to put it, “radical sustainable design just means designing ­little ­things a lot, all over” (2013b, 14); in other words, sustainability is such a huge challenge because it reveals the infinite number of small ­things that will need to change. More theoretically, thinking sustainability through design brings forth the challenging question, “How do you translate a new cognitive paradigm into material environments and everyday practices?” (10; see also Tonkinwise 2013a), which in turn requires a renewed attention to materiality from which t­here might emerge more sustainable mind-­sets, attention to questions of scale, and the reconceptualization of materiality. This brings to the fore the repoliticization of sustainable design, especially if one considers that oftentimes the proc­ess takes place through grassroots innovation, calling on design activists to engage in the relocalization of making ­things and in the socially and culturally complex task of networking sustainable innovations.

The ontological concern with sustainability has been the subject of Mexican ecologist Enrique Leff’s decades-­long effort at developing an ontological and po­liti­cal framework for sustainability, mentioned in passing in chapter 3 (Leff 2002, 2015; see Escobar 2008, 103-106, 129-132, for a discussion of this author’s work). As Leff states, “po­liti­cal ecology constructs its theoretical and po­liti­cal identity in a world of mutation, driven by an environmental crisis: a crisis of being-­in-­the-­living-world… .Something new is emerging in this world of uncertainty, chaos and unsustainability. Through the interstices opened up in the cracks of monolithic rationality and totalitarian thinking, environmental complexity sheds new light on the ­future to come. This ‘something’ emerges as a need for emancipation or a ­will to live” (2012, 32). For this something to be cultivated, ­there is a need for a new ecological episteme, one in which sustainability becomes the horizon for purposive living based on a dialogue of knowledges and cultures. Leff’s vision, influenced by Heidegger and deconstruction, also signals an ongoing transition with open-­ended futuring possibilities.

Ontological Design and the Question of Agency

None of the ontological design approaches discussed so far are very clear about the agency ­behind the reenvisioned design, and a more satisfactory discussion of this thorny issue ­will have to await the discussion of transition design and autonomous design, where ­there is a more explicit sense of agency. While the idea that every­body designs is taken seriously, the proponents of ontological design seem to reserve a special role for a kind of designer who has the necessary disposition and training to carry the ontological undesigning/ redesigning proj­ect forward. Thinking about agency ontologically calls for a more nuanced understanding of “use,” which Mark Titmarsh and Tonkinwise (2013) explore through a reinterpretation of the interrelations between art and design. The roles of research, technology, and the studio as well as the po­liti­cal economy of unsustainability are the subject of much debate from the perspective of the ontological framing, yet the agent who is carry­ing out ­these practices remains elusive. Fry comes close in his discussion of the types of people who ­will emerge in the wake of the radical changes brought about by unsustainability, defuturing, and unsettlement, and of course not all the characters he envisions in his posthuman fiction will play a constructive role ­toward Sustainment. How the “worldly rematerialization” capable of “enabling the ‘being-­otherwise’ of t­hese [new] beings” ­will take place is not explic­itly discussed (Fry 2012, 208).14

The understanding of agency in con­temporary theory has been transformed dramatically as a result of the ontological turn. With the arrival of objects, t­hings, nonhumans, spirits, and so forth into theory’s orbit, the explanation of what life is and how it gets constituted into worlds has been significantly enriched. The concept of distributed agency—which suggests that agency is not the result of discrete actions by single subjects acting intentionally but largely the effect of complex heterogeneous networks of ­humans and nonhumans—­has profound implications for design, and ­these ­will be explored in the next chapter (Manzini 2015). The key ontological design question of “how our tools are part of the background in which we can ask what it is to be ­human” (Winograd and Flores 1986, 163) thus becomes more complicated; it needs to be broadened at the very least by considering how the designers’ understanding of ­humans and worlds changes when all kinds of nonhumans, and the heterogeneous assemblages of life they bring into existence, are brought into the picture.

One of the thorny issues in discussions about design agency is that of authorship. The emphasis on codesign, of course, takes direct aim at the reified and glorified notion of authorship, ­whether in product design, urbanism, or architecture. Yet the reliance on a strong notion of authorship is not so easily dispelled. As architectural historian Amy Zhang puts it well, “­there is a crucial need in architecture to question the ontology of the designer before directing the attention t­owards any critical reflexivity on the practice’s ontological effects” (pers. comm., July 17, 2015). In addition, she argues, notions of individual authorship are being dramatically eroded by the digital modeling to which architectural practice has become subservient, without even talking about financial dependence and compensation issues. Yet a certain dualism continues to remain in place: author/design (and potential correlates, such as nonauthor/nondesign). Also at stake ­here are entrenched divisions of ­labor and issues of race and gender, enabling the (often white and male) author-designer to act with total obliviousness to the material and economic dimensions of production. This type of objectified authorship is inimical to genuine practices of collaboration and design for and from relationality.

A phenomenologically oriented notion of agency is embedded in Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer’s concept of “leading from the emerging ­future” (Scharmer 2009; Scharmer and Kaufer 2012). Their foundational insight about “acting from the presence of what is wanting to emerge” (19) involves a robust notion of relationality and futuring. Their notion of presencing is proposed as a way to counteract the ontology of disconnection (“Ego-­System”) that is killing the Earth through consumption; it implies an expanded view of the self and might foster design thinking and prototyping that embody the new that is emerging or wants to emerge. This kind of presencing, as the authors argue, is conducive to a transitional space where new kinds of “frontline practi­tion­ers” tap into emerging social-­natural configurations in order to facilitate new communal connections. The frontline practitioner would realize that “the real power comes from recognizing patterns that are forming and fitting with them” (Scharmer 2009, 32). They would face head-on Varela’s injunction that modern science does not understand experience—t­hey ­will delve into (in principle, nondualist) experience as a veritable wellspring for design. Their framework comprises a series of shifts (from downloading, seeing, and sensing to presencing, crystallizing, prototyping, and performing) that involve “letting go,” “letting come,” enacting, and embodying the emergent. ­These shifts take place within a social space of collective creation (presencing) and destruction (absencing), requiring a significant personal transformation ­toward more relational modes of being. This proposal can be considered an ontological design framework, and to some extent is presented as such.15

Thinking about agency in the context of Sustainment and transitions brings with it its own challenges. In the last part of the chapter I would like to inquire into the possibility of design practices informed by nondualism and relationality; from this perspective, the question becomes that of ­whether nondualist action can be fostered ­under the conditions of deworlding and defuturing mapped by Fry and collaborators. We can lean on Varela once more in search for clues to answer this question, before returning to a final discussion of ontological design. I should make it clear, however, that this is one par­tic­u­lar way to explore the practice and ethics of ontologically oriented design. Along the way, we will find some support for this inquiry in the pluralization of musics happening all over the world ­today.

Nondualism in Everyday Life? Varela’s Question

In the third lecture in Ethical Know-­How (1999), Varela deals with the absence of a self as we know it in the West, proposing the notion of a selfless or virtual self as an emergent property of a distributed system mediated by social interactions (52-63). For Varela, a key question arising from both of these conceptualizations is whether we can learn to embody the empty self, that is, to really develop a practical way to go beyond the assumption of the self-i­nterested autonomous individual and the businesslike and ego-­clinging features it commands.16 This is what the Buddhist mindfulness tradition is all about; it aims to provide a means to nonduality as well as princi­ples for groundlessness as compassion. This is not the place to discuss further the Buddhist part of Varela’s argument; suffice it to say that he concludes that the ac­cept­ance of the nonsolidity of the self brings about an aut­hen­tic type of care; indeed, “­here one is positing that aut­hen­tic care resides at the very ground of Being, and can be made fully manifest in a sustained, successful ethical training. A thoroughly alien thought for our nihilistic Western mood, indeed, but one worthy of being entertained” (73).17

The corollary is stated as a genuine question: “How can such an attitude of all-­encompassing, responsive, compassionate concerns be fostered and embodied in our culture?” (73). To be sure, the answer starts by restating that “it obviously cannot be created through norms and rationalistic injunctions,” or just through new concepts or self-i­mprovement schemes; on the contrary, “it must be developed and embodied through disciplines that facilitate the letting-go of ego-­centered habits and enable compassion to become spontaneous and self-­sustaining” (73), with each individual growing into his or her own sense of nonduality, au­then­tic caring, and nonintentional action. This ­will surely sound too esoteric and spiritual to many modern readers (however, the notion resonates with how intellectual-activists from social movements speak about their activist skills for history making, as briefly discussed in chapter 2). We find a sustained answer to this question in the framework for “the work that reconnects” developed by Joanna Macy and colleagues from the perspective of systems thinking, ecology, feminism, and Buddhism (Macy and Brown 1998; Macy 2007; Macy and Johnstone 2012). Macy’s goal is to provide an intellectual and practical path for moving from a self-­destructive “industrial growth society” to a “life-­sustaining” one. This epochal shift, a ­Great Turning, demands a profound change in our perception of real­ity, including surrendering our belief in a separate self and adopting an ecological self; abandoning anthropocentrism in f­avor of a life-­centered paradigm; acknowledging the dependent coarising of all t­hings, including the knower and the known, body and mind; fostering structural changes at the level of economic systems and technology; and cultivating shifts in consciousness through various means, such as nondualist spiritualities. Only then can one hope to be “in league with the beings of the ­future” (2007, 191), a concept that speaks to the concerns of sustainability.

Macy bravely addresses why we keep on failing to make t­hese insights into effective forces in the real world, or how we can. Coincidentally, her most recent book, coauthored with Chris Johnstone, is dedicated “to the flourishing of life on this rare and wondrous planet” (Macy and Johnstone 2012)—­another reference to sustainability as flourishing. We will encounter Macy’s vision again in the discussion on transition narratives. For now, we can ask: are ­Varela’s question and Macy’s insights useful for design? Can design be more attuned to ­these realizations? To inhabiting spaces of nonduality, nonliberalism, noncapitalism? To finding sources of the nonself in the most con­temporary struggles and situations? ­These are questions for an anthropology and cultural studies of design that takes an ontological approach seriously.

With ­these questions, we are back within the critical analys­is of modernity. Modernity is, indeed, the larger onto-­epistemic formation within which the rationalistic tradition has thrived. I have deliberately eschewed in this work a substantial discussion of perspectives on modernity. It is impor­tant, however, to put modernity in its place, so to speak. Somehow we seem to have accepted the idea that some version of modernity is here to stay, globally, until the end of times. It is worth quoting Ashis Nandy once more to interrogate this assumption:

The time has come for us to restore some of the categories used by the victims themselves to understand the vio­lence, injustice and indignity to which they have been subjected in our times…These neglected categories provide a vital clue to the repressed intellectual self of our world, particularly to that part which is trying to keep alive the visions of a more demo­cratic and less expropriatory mode of living. To that other self of the world of knowledge, modernity is neither the end-­state of all cultures nor the final word in institutional creativity. Howsoever formidable and permanent the edifice of the modern world may appear t­oday, that other self recognizes, one day ­there ­will have to be post-­modern socie­ties and a post-­modern consciousness, and ­those socie­ties and that consciousness may choose to build not so much upon modernity as on the traditions of the non-­modern or pre-­modern world. (1987, xvii)

One could interpret Nandy’s discussion as speaking about the futuring possibilities embedded within, and often articulated by, the most direct victims of modern defuturing. It is impor­tant to restate, however, that Nandy is not advocating for an intransigent defense of tradition. His reworking of the concepts of tradition and modernity is much more sophisticated than that; besides, he is interested first and foremost in the dialogue among cultures. Most movements in the South are not interested in a recalcitrant defense of traditions ­either, even if advocates of modernity on all ends of the po­liti­cal spectrum continue to corner them into such a slot in the name of one or another universalism or dualism. Nandy acknowledges the importance of excavating and fighting for a lost or repressed West (just as I have spoken of alternative Wests that might constitute sources of nondualist ontologies). Perhaps the time has come to stop regarding any reference to tradition as pathological, romantic, or nostalgic. Care should be taken of course not to fall into an uncritical defense of traditions that might shelter one form of oppression or another (e.g., patriarchy). But one can legitimately ask, can some types of tradition not be used ­today as tools for criticism, futuring, and sustainment? “The choice of traditions I am speaking of involves the identification, within a tradition, of the capacity for self-­renewal through heterodoxy, plurality, and dissent. It involves the capacity in a culture to be open-­ended, self-analytic and self-aware without being overly self-­conscious…Fortunately, cultures are usually more open and self-­critical than their interpreters” (Nandy 1987, 120).

Social groups in struggle, at their best, move in several directions at once: adding to, and strengthening, their long-­standing practices, while mastering the modern world, its practices and technologies. Bolivian scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2014) points at this feature with her notion of sociedades abigarradas, referring to the capacity of Latin American popu­lar and indigenous cultures to define their own forms of modernity, more convivial than the dominant ones precisely ­because they also find nourishment in their own histories, intricately weaving indigenous and local practices with t­hose that are not local, thus resulting in worlds made up of dif­fer­ent cultural strands that affect each other without nevertheless fusing into one.18 From this, in her view, stem more lasting intercultural entanglements because they find sustenance in the complementarities among diverse worlds without overlooking the antagonisms, articulating with market economies while anchored in indigenous knowledge and technologies. ­Here lies an entire novel view of modernities and traditions, a pluriversal framework.

Design and the Relational Ontologies of ­Music

Some genres in con­temporary popu­lar music are an apt model to describe what many groups and movements ­today are seeking to accomplish through their innovative cultural and po­liti­cal practices. Usually described as “fusion,” ­these globalized genres involve features that seem utterly contradictory: a commitment to a place-­based musical tradition but at the same time an opening up of that tradition more than ever to conversations with other world ­musics and to the use of a panoply of digital and nonconventional production technologies to achieve the best pos­si­ble rhythms and sounds.19 The results are oftentimes unique and original, power­ful in the ways in which they engage ­people’s bodies and consciousness, perhaps confirming Jacques Attali’s (1985) contention that ­music, more than theory, heralds the new cultural and po­liti­cal ­orders to come. Does this prophetic function of ­music suggest at the very least that some artistic practices such as music might be more attuned to relational being? Can con­temporary fusions be considered in any way to be effectively interepistemic and pluriversal and, if so, a source of inspiration for the type of novel collaborative design practices envisioned by design thinkers such as Ezio Manzini (2015)? Are musicians engaging in ontological politics when they collaborate in the making of across-worlds ­musics? Do con­temporary ­musics of a certain kind open up new possibilities for being-i­n-­sound?20

Some of t­hese questions are broached by music and cultural theorist Ana María Ochoa Gautier (2014) in her historical research on the relation between aurality and being. What she finds is that acoustics has been an intensive area of design innovation in the West since at least the nineteenth century. The acoustic collapses form and event, calling forth a rethinking of the relations among pro­cess, design, and materiality. Building on Stephen Feld’s notion of acoustemology, Ochoa Gautier goes on to discuss how sound confounds the bound­aries between epistemology and ontology, revealing the existence of relational regimes of aurality where the physics of sound, musical form, (im)materiality, sound technology, and sound perception all play a part. In her examination of nineteenth-­century Eu­ro­pean accounts of native musics in Colombia, she unveils an entire po­liti­cal ontology of ­music surrounding ­these accounts. One of the lessons of her examination of acoustic ontologies is that “local sounds” are not static traits meant to represent a par­tic­ul­ar place; t­here has always been a kind of “sonic transculturation” (Ochoa Gautier 2006) that the new fusions bring to new levels of sophistication, thus setting in motion a pluriversal force. By bringing sound and aurality to the forefront, she hopes to redress the overwhelming focus of critical design studies on the visual.

Another in­ter­est­ing attempt at linking design and ­music is the notion that design might be emerging as a fifth principle of radical musical practice at pres­ent. This idea has been suggested by Amy Zhang for the case of some con­temporary ­musics (pers. comm., January 15 2012). She bases this suggestion on Attali’s (1985, 20) identification of ritual, repre­sen­ta­tion, repetition, and composition as the four main historical modes of music production from the perspective of the relations between society and power specific to par­tic­ul­ar historical periods.21 For Attali, composition, unlike the previous modes, disrupts the dominant codes and po­liti­cal economy of music and inaugurates a real potential for relationality and collective experimentation. Attali quotes the Italian avant-­garde composer Luciano Berio: “If we compose ­music, we are also composed by history, by situations that constantly challenge us” (141); this can be seen as a rendition of the idea that design designs, challenging us into futuring kinds of design. To this Attali adds:

­Music is no longer made to be represented or stockpiled, but for participation in collective play, in an ongoing quest for new, immediate communication, without ritual and always unstable. It becomes nonreproducible, irreversible…Music is ushering in a new age. Should we read this emergence asthe herald of a liberation from exchange-­value, or only of the emplacementof a new trap for music and its consumers, that of automanipulation? Theanswer to ­these questions, I think, depends on the radicality of the experiment. Inducing ­people to compose using predefined instruments cannotlead to a mode of production dif­fer­ent from that authorized by t­hose in struments. (141)

It could be added, following Zhang’s insight, that con­temporary ­music adds novel ele­ments to Attali’s compositional principle, including open-­endedness, working across musical and cultural difference, collaborative creation, and so forth. If this is so, perhaps one can say that design is the compositional model appropriate to the pluriversal age. For Zhang, composition has fallen short of its promise, given its continued reliance on individual authorship and its immersion in commercial capitalism. Other practices are emerging. This is a trend that ontologically minded designers would do well to keep in mind as they reimagine design practices that avoid the traps of past design modes of operation.

Back to Ontological Design

Let’s begin by highlighting some aspects shared by the ontological design conceptions summarized in this chapter. First is the rejection of Cartesianism, broadly speaking, whether in the form of John Law’s “One-­World World,” Heidegger’s “Age of the World Picture” (including the enframing effect of the world as object to be appropriated), or the notion of an ontology of autonomous subjects confronting discrete, self-­standing objects that the scientist can study in isolation or the designer manipulate at ­will. This metaphysics is replaced by an ontology in which humans do not discover the world but constitute it, ­whether through enaction (Varela), language (Winograd and Flores), meshworks (Ingold), or the ineluctable thrownness and engagement with t­hings (e.g., Fry, Willis, Tonkinwise). The various readings represent diverse attempts at developing nondualist approaches to knowledge, cognition, and design. They go beyond critique to offer alternative formulations.

­There is also agreement that ontological design is design ­after the “subject,” and certainly ­after the subject/object divide. It f­avors modes of being-i­n-t­he-world beyond humanism, nihilism, and reason-­centered anthropocentrism (Spinosa, Dreyfus, and Flores; Plumwood; Fry). Ontologically oriented design thus necessarily has a critical impetus. It involves “rethinking the way society is or­ga­nized, shifting values, and significantly altering business models and economic thinking,” as Tonkinwise (2012, 8) puts it. Does this mean that ontological design approaches become an integral part of critical design studies? It makes sense to claim that this is the case for several reasons. First, ontological design contributes to a relational understanding of the material, as it aims to dematerialize society through a new awareness of materiality and through the innovation of new ways in which society can “resource itself.” This in turn implicates a transformed attention to practice (including the articulation of design and ethnography); a recovery of the agency of ­things, their “vibrant materiality,” as opposed to the alleged inertness of “objects” (Bennett 2010); a resituation of the material within the metabolism of the economy (production and consumption), as ecological economics instructs; and a reintegration of design into larger assemblages stemming from place.

Ontologically oriented design thinkers share a belief in the radical innovative potential of design. Clearly, business-­as-­usual modes of designing and living have to be superseded. “I want ‘business as usual,’” says Tonkinwise, “to just dis­appear ­because it’s destroying the planet socially and ecologically…Within design thinking ­there is an idealistic drive ­toward anti-­capitalism, or at least anti-­business-­as-­usual” (2012, 8, 14). The realization of this radical potential, to continue with this design theorist, requires a profound relational sensibility that links materiality, visuality, and empathy (via practice) in the creation of novel assemblages of infrastructures and devices, skills and know-­how, and meanings and identities. Fi­nally, ­there is a shared emphasis on the need to imbue design education with the tools for ontological reflection in ways that make designers conscious of their own situatedness in the ecologies for which they design.

As a Way of Concluding

The following are some features of the ontological approach to design, as a way to conclude this chapter. The list is purposely elaborated on the basis of the works presented in the chapter. Ontologically oriented design

• Recognizes that all design creates a “world-­within-t­he-­world” in which we are designed by what we design as subjects. We are all designers, and we are all designed.

• Is a strategy for transitions from Enlightenment (unsustainability, defuturing, deworlding, destruction) to Sustainment (futuring, reworlding, creation). It embraces ontologically futuring practices, particularly ­those involving the bringing into being of relational worlds and humans.

• Avoids defuturing into objects and reveals technology’s contribution to unsustainability. It brings together imagination and technology onto logically, and it tackles head-on the anthropogenesis of technicity.

• Is postsubject and postobject; it goes beyond the techno-­rationalism of the self (user, author) as intrinsically existing; it challenges the hegemonic category of the ­human while striving for a posthuman practiceby raising the question of civilizational transitions.

Is not a(bout) straightforward fabrication but about modes of reveal ing; it considers retrieving forms of making that are not merely techno logical, while embracing new creations. It may do so by looking at the entire range of design traditions (within the West and beyond) non-­Eurocentrically and decolonially.

Is not about “expanding the range of choices” (liberal freedom) but isintended to transform the kinds of beings we desire to be. In this sense,it is potentially noncapitalist or postcapitalist and nonliberal.

Builds on life’s and the Earth’s immanent capacity for self-­organization.It tackles head-on the question of artificiality but does so while beingmindful of the complex webs of life that make up the pluriverse.

It promotes convivial and communal instrumentations involvinghuman/nonhuman collectives provoked into existence by ecologicalbreakdowns or shared experiences of harm. It imagines designs that takeseriously the active powers issuing from nonhumans, and it builds onthe positive ontology of vibrant matter, realizing that design situationsalways involve encounters between ­human and nonhuman actants of allkinds.

It involves the design of domains in which desired actions are generatedand interpreted; it explic­itly contributes to creating the languages thatcreate the world(s) in which people operate. In the creation of domainsof conversations for action, it necessarily moves from design to experi ence and back (through, say, prototyping and scenario analysis). It in quires about the extent to which the creation of new designs ­enables

an outline of ontological design 133 better domains of interpretation and action to emerge, without over looking power dynamics. It always entails reconnection: with nonhumans, with ­things in their thinghood, with the Earth (Earth-­wise connections), with spirit, and of course with humans in their radical alterity (decolonially, considering the inclusion of multiple worlds, rather than exclusion). It contributes to dismantling dualisms and takes seriously all forms of nondualist ex istence. At its best, it discerns paths to (greater) mindfulness and en ables ontologies of compassion and care. All design is for enactive use (not involving just users), produces opera tional effectiveness (but not narrowly defined utility), fosters the auto poiesis of living entities and heterogeneous assemblages of life, and is mindful of living in the pluriverse.We ­shall revisit some of ­these features at the very end of this book, particularly ­after the discussion of autonomous design and the concept of the communal. For now, it is fitting to end this chapter with the following plea by Tonkinwise: “So we, especially we designers, must become much more steeped in ontological accounts of what design means, and what the human that is designed and so designs, is and can be” ( [2014?], 7). Herein lies a constructive program for ontological design.

Notes

Chapter 4: An Outline of Ontological Design

Epigraphs: Virilio, The Administration of Fear (2012), 46, 72; Willis, “Ontological Designing—Laying the Ground” (2006), 80; Winograd and Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition (1986), xi.

1 “Can We Auto-­Correct Humanity?” by Prince Ea, posted online on September 29, 2014 by Prince Ea, 3.27 min: https://­www.youtube.­com/­watch?­v=dR18EIhrQjQ (accessed on January 10, 2017, when it had over eigh­teen million views).

2 As the mantra goes, “­Because we live in an increasingly globalized, rapidly changing, and interdependent world” (the slogan of Public Radio International). One should always add “increasingly devastated” to this facile mantra. In this seemingly slight addition we find an expression of the challenges and politics of design.

3 I am drawing here on the insightful short book on the po­liti­cal geology of media technologies by Finnish theorist of digital culture Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene (2016). See also Gibson-­Graham, Cameron, and Healy (2013, 95-104) for a discussion of the ethical and economic implications of the market in so-­called conflict minerals.

4 Virilio is likely the most enlightening critic of new technologies. He is most well known as a phi­los­o­pher of speed, or, more precisely, of the relations among speed, power, and technology. In his view, information and communication technologies, operating in real time, alter dramatically our long-­standing experience of place, body, time, and space, inaugurating a dromosphere, a space of living ruled by speed (see, e.g., Virilio 1997, 1999, 2012). The generalized delocalization caused by these technologies, and taken to its ultimate applications by military technology, reveals for Virilio that what is at stake is contrasting conceptions of the world (diverging ontologies). Of his work he says that it “is that of a resister' ­because ­there are too many collaborators’ who are once again pulling the trick of redemptory pro­gress, emancipation, [­humans] liberated from all repression, etc.” (1999, 80). Virilio

244 Notes to Chapter Three attended Maurice Merleau-­Ponty’s lectures in Paris for a time, which intensified his interest in phenomenology. I ­will return to the question of technology in the conclusion. 5 The most insightful of the cyberpunk novels was, to my mind, William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), where the term cyberspace was actually coined. In this and several of his subsequent novels, Gibson explores the changed body politics enacted by technology, in par­tic­u­lar the largely male fantasies of total disembodiment (see Escobar 1994 for further discussion). 6 This aspect of the book draws heavi­ly on Martin Heidegger and Hans-­Georg Gadamer. A tradition is a pervasive background or preunderstanding within which we act in, and interpret, the world; it is concealed by its obviousness; it is historically produced and impossible to describe in its entirety (the hermeneutic circle). As Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela put it, referring to how they came up with the novel concept of autopoiesis, “we could not escape being immersed in a tradition, but with an adequate language we could orient ourselves differently and, perhaps, from the new perspective generate a new tradition” (1980, xvii). The novelty of their work lies precisely in the invention of a new lexicon for talking about biological existence, particularly cognition, as we shall see in the last chapter. 7 Throughout the book Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus discuss exemplary figures of this type of skill, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and the group ­Mothers against Drunk Driving. I have applied ­these concepts to the case of the activists in the movement of the black communities of the Colombian Pacific, whose activism can genuinely be seen as a practice of skillful disclosing and history making in the midst of a sustained attack on their territories and culture by developmentalist actors (Escobar 2008, 229-236). 8 An impor­tant part of Winograd and Flores’s framework is the development of a linguistic approach to the work of organi­zations based on “directives” (­orders, requests, consultations, and offers) and “commissives” (promises, ac­cep­tances, and rejections). In the 1980s Flores developed a software program for organi­zations, called the Coordinator, based on the idea that organi­zations are networks of commitments operating in language. See Winograd and Flores (1986, chs. 5 and 11) and Flores and Flores Letelier (2013). Its objective was “to make the interactions transparent—to provide a ready-­to-­hand tool that operates in the domain of conversations for action” (1986, 159). Anthropologist Lucy Suchman (1994) has proposed a cogent critique of Winograd and Flores’s reliance on speech act theory for their theory of organ­izations. In her opinion, their framework veers perilously close to the imposition of a Foucauldian disciplinary order by a group of allegedly enlightened designers. This leaves untouched organ­izations’ links to power, while ­people’s actions get normalized in the name of a higher form of rationality. In other words, she casts doubts on Winograd and Flores’s claim that their approach constitutes an emancipatory alternative. I agree with most of this critique, although I am trying to recover the po­liti­cal potential of their view of ontological design through my interpretation, ­going beyond language. 9 What else is the anthropocene if not the result of design choices, a design itself perhaps? 10 This is a very partial account of Fry’s sustained attempt at providing a new foundation for design, developed through a number of major books and multiple articles. Fry’s view articulates par­tic­u­lar readings of evolutionary theory, sociotechnics, Nietz­schean genealogy, and Heideggerian phenomenology. ­There is a practical side to Fry’s work, particularly in urban design (besides design education, of course). This account is largely based on Fry’s three main books of the last few years. (I will not discuss here aspects of Fry’s work that are less convincing to me, such as his Nietz­schean notion of the humax.) 11 See also Fry’s current proj­ect, The Studio at the Edge of the World, http://­www.thestudioattheedgeoftheworld.­com/­.12 Besides Heidegger and Maturana, Ehrenfeld draws on the critique of industrial society by early Frankfurt school writers (particularly Erich Fromm), the Chilean critic of development Manfred Max-­Neef, and Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration. Tellingly, he acknowledges Flores for introducing him to Heidegger and Maturana “through an intensive program in ontological design” in the Bay Area in the late 1980s (2009, xxii). ­Those versed in con­temporary critical social theory might find peculiar or problematic the combination of theoretical sources (say, going back to Fromm, who was indeed an enlightened critic of modernity), or the focus on addictive be­hav­ior, which might be seen as harking back to much-­criticized psychological approaches, but ­here again I will encourage the more theoretically minded readers to consider Ehrenfeld’s effort as a salient instance of ontological thought on design. 13 Ehrenfeld cites the local food movement and new toilets that instruct users about flushing decisions, which he sees as eventually inducing a more profound change of consciousness. The approach remains largely theoretical, however, and does not deal explic­itly with politics. That said, the notions of flourishing, presencing (of Heideggerian and Buddhist derivation, a concept we ­will encounter again when discussing the work of Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer below), and care are all ele­ments of an emergent design lexicon. 14 Fry envisions seven pos­si­ble types of ­human beings emerging, the character of which can be gleaned from the labels: homotecs (radically pro-­technology), neo-­nomads, war-­takers, hoarder survivalists, scavengers, gatherers, and palingensiaists (keepers and ­re-­creators of knowledge). See Fry (2012, 205-211) for his discussion of ­these “­people of the future.” 15 This is an inadequate pre­sen­ta­tion of t­hese authors’ ideas. See their work at the Presencing Institute (https://­www.presencing.­com/­). Their ideas are influenced by Heidegger and Varela as well as by orga­nizational scholars Peter Senge and Brian Arthur. A prob­lem with this framework that is often discussed (e.g., by PhD students in my graduate seminar on design) is the risk of co-­optation owing to a lingering individualist orientation and the absence of a more explicit sense of politics. ­There is also a certain teleology in how the authors pres­ent the models of “economic evolution”: the State-­driven “Society 1.0,” market-­driven “Society 2.0,” stakeholder-­driven “Society 3.0,” and ecosystem-­driven “Society 4.0,” or the “con-­creative economy.” As in much of this otherwise-­creative work in the United States, there is very l­ittle explicit critique of capitalism, and an insufficiently examined willingness to work with corporations. On the positive side, I would say that this theory is unusual in that it tackles the inner work designers need to do in order to take seriously the challenges of presencing and nondualism.

16 For a related argument about moving beyond the autonomous individual that instead draws on historical and con­temporary Western sources, see Dreyfus and Kelly (2011).

17 On care, see Boff ‘s (2002) work; his argument about care as a fundamental ontological structure is based on Heidegger, religious thought, and the everyday actions of common ­people. ­There is a voluminous feminist lit­er­a­ture on care, from economists who focus on the care economy to scholars in science and technology studies who introduce ethical care concerns into the domain of relations between ­human and nonhuman (e.g., Haraway 2008). María Puig de la Bellacasa (2015) brings an original ­angle into the care debates, that of the existing tension between the productivist time of capitalism, innovation, and technoscience (and, one might add, design as usual), on the one hand, and the temporalities required for an effective ethics of caring for the webs of relationality that maintain life, across the entire spectrum of material, ­human, and nonhuman forms, on the other.

18 Sociedades abigarradas is a difficult term to translate; it can mean “motley, variegated, jumbled, or heterogeneous socie­ties.”

19 While ­these fusions bring together musics from practically all world regions, t­here are some places that constitute particularly rich musical sources at pres­ent, such as West Africa (Mali and Senegal); Cuba, Colombia, and Brazil in Latin Amer­i­ca; and Eur­ope and North Amer­i­ca (in some of their folk traditions). (The London-­based magazine Songlines is dedicated to ­these fusions.) I am afraid I know ­little about world ­musics from other world regions.

20 Fusion is actually a misnomer for what musicians mean. As the well-known Flamenco singer Diego el Cigala says, the concept of fusion implies the disappearance of worlds, yet in musical collaborations the worlds do not dis­appear but are reenacted in dialogue. In support of this idea, el Cigala mentions a conversation with salsa musician Bebo Valdés: “Tu canta como ese gitano que eres que yo tocaré como el cubano que soy” (“you go ahead and sing like the Gypsy you are, and I will play like the Cuban I am”). See the program with El Cigala, “Diego el Cigala. Encuentro en el estudio,” published by Canal Encuentro, Buenos Aires, August 21, 2014, 55.26 min: https://­www.youtube.­com/­watch ?­v=­10yhpNCqn9Y. Collaborations are found across all kinds of ­musics, including within classical, popu­lar, and folk musics; witness, for instance, the fascinating collaboration Uniko (2004/2011) between the San Francisco-­based Kronos Quartet and the Finnish musicians Kimmo Pohjonen (accordion and voice) and Samuli Hosminen (voice sampling, live loops, and digital interfaces). Interestingly, musicians often describe collaborations as doing “what is best for the music” when they collaborate (as in jam sessions, but more pointedly in intergenre productions). Two explicit conversations in this regard that I happen to know of are that among the Venetian electronic music composer Luigi Nono, the director Claudio Abbado, and the pianist Murizio Pollini (see the documentary A Trail on the ­Water, directed by Bettina Ehrhardt [2001]), and, in a very dif­fer­ent vein, that among Argentinean folk musicians Peteco Carabajal, the duo Coplanacu, and Raly Barrionuevo (see the dvd of their collaboration, La Juntada (Carabajal, Coplanacu and Barrionuevo 2004).

Notes to Chapter Four 247 21 Attali bases his argument about composition on avant-­garde composers such as Luciano Berio, John Cage, Luigi Nono, and Pierre Boulez but also on American ­free jazz, a mixture of African American popu­lar ­music and Eu­ropean experimental ­music.