Conference PaperPDF Available

RECONSTRAINED DESIGN: CONFRONTING OBLIQUE DESIGN CONSTRAINTS

Authors:
  • Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay

Abstract and Figures

This paper presents the identification and analysis of a set of four 'oblique constraints'—named as progress dogma, future nudge, means and ends, and infrastraints—which act as pervasive but often unacknowledged constraining influences that shape design practice and by extension limit future possibilities. We ask: How and why is power exerted? How might this lead to impoverished or problematic futures? How can this dynamic be changed from a design perspective? Drawing from examples of recent work around renewable energy we show how design can be reconstrained to reveal new pathways and encourage more inclusive, holistic, and environmentally responsible futures.
Content may be subject to copyright.
No 7 (2017): Nordes 2017; Design + Power, Oslo, www.nordes.org 1
RECONSTRAINED DESIGN:
CONFRONTING OBLIQUE DESIGN
CONSTRAINTS
CONTROLS
JAMES AUGER
MADEIRA INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGIES
INSTITUTE - JAMES.AUGER@M-ITI.ORG
JULIAN HANNA
MADEIRA INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGIES
INSTITUTE - JULIAN.HANNA@M-ITI.ORG
ENGAGEMENTS
ENRIQUE ENCINAS
NORTHUMBRIA UNIVERSITY
ENRIQUE.ENCINAS@NORTHUMBRIA.AC.UK
ABSTRACT
This paper presents the identification and analysis
of a set of four ‘oblique constraints’named as
progress dogma, future nudge, means and ends,
and infrastraintswhich act as pervasive but often
unacknowledged constraining influences that shape
design practice and by extension limit future
possibilities.
We ask: How and why is power exerted? How
might this lead to impoverished or problematic
futures? How can this dynamic be changed from a
design perspective? Drawing from examples of
recent work around renewable energy we show
how design can be reconstrained to reveal new
pathways and encourage more inclusive, holistic,
and environmentally responsible futures.
INTRODUCTION
Powerspecifically social and political powermay be
defined as the ability to influence the course of events.
Power has a temporal aspect, in the sense that
influencemeans acting in the present to change the
future. When this situation is applied to design, there
are:
forces (of power) that influence people (designers) and
therefore also (designed) events.
On one level, this is not news to designers. Design
practice always happens under a particular set of forces
or conditions, commonly known as constraints. These
constraints may be straightforward and indisputable,
such as a physical or material qualitythe force of
gravity or the tensile strength of a structural beam.
Constraints of this basic type influence the design
process by informing choices and decisions.
But constraints can also be more abstract, hidden or
complex (e.g. legacy infrastructure), meaning that they
are often overlooked by designers as they focus on more
practical, material, and (seemingly) apolitical concerns.
The pervasive nature of these grander constraints results
in a narrower range of technological possibilities than
we might otherwise experience. They keep us to a
limited path or trajectory, and in some cases condemn
us to repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
Rather than acting directly, their path of influence is
oblique.
This paper draws on historical and contemporary
examples to identify and examine four constraining
factors shaping our possible futures. From another
perspective, the constraints we identify could be
described as barriers to a more responsible design
practice. The constraint of progress dogma, for
example, blinds future-shapersscientists,
technologists, politicians, designersfrom the
potentially negative implications of their proposals. The
simple story of progress is: technology is good, and as
long as technology takes the lead, the future will be
better than the present. The three other major constraints
on how the future happens that are discussed in the first
part of this paper include: future nudge, means and
ends, and infrastraints. The pervasive and hard-to-pin-
2
down nature of these constraints means that they are
often ignored, taken for granted, or treated as immutable
laws. This acceptance serves the interest of those with
the power to benefit from their continuance.
Underpinning this paper is the basic question: What is a
better future? Our goal is to improve our understanding
of: a) how and why power is exerted, b) how this may
lead to impoverished or problematic futures, and c) how
this dynamic could be changed from a design
perspective. To address the last point, in the second part
of this paper we draw from examples of our recent work
to show how design can be reconstrained to reveal new
pathways, and how design practiced apart from
traditional large-scale oblique constraints might
encourage more inclusive, holistic, and environmentally
responsible futures.
IDENTIFYING (AND RETHINKING) OBLIQUE
CONSTRAINTS
We now present four oblique constraints to illustrate
how design practice can be inadvertently restricted by
indirect, but powerful, influences.
PROGRESS DOGMA
Charles Eames once described design as ‘a plan for
arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose’
(Eames 1972). The appeal of this simple statement is
that it operates across multiple scales, material
complexities, and timeframes: from a piece of furniture
to a city plan; from a length of wood to biological parts
(now seen as designable through synthetic biology); or
from the marketplace of tomorrow to a distant future
world. But especially relevant is the phrase ‘a particular
purpose’. In general terms this is the arranging of
available elements to create useful objects designed to
exist and usually to be sold. Increasingly these elements
are technological, and as such the designer can be seen
as tasked with translating technological potential into
useful, usable, desirable products. The assumption is
that these products make life better.
The first oblique constraint we approach, therefore, is
the fundamental belief that technological development
will simply and inevitably lead to a better futurethe
constraint of progress dogma. According to political
theorist Langdon Winner:
It is still a prerequisite that the person running for public
office swear his or her unflinching confidence in a positive
link between technical development and human well-being
and affirm that the next wave of innovations will surely be our
salvation.(Winner 2010: 5).
Belief in technology has a strong foundation. Christian
Schussele’s painting Men of Progress (Figure 1) was
commissioned in 1857 by Jordan Mott, the inventor of a
coal-burning stove, to celebrate a group of key scientists
and inventors who were thought to have positively
altered the course of contemporary civilisation. The
group included Cyrus McCormick (mechanical reaper),
Charles Goodyear (vulcanised rubber), Elias Howe
(sewing machine), and William T. G. Morgan (surgical
anaesthetic). It would be difficult to argue that these
four inventions were not instrumental in improving
people’s lives in significant ways. There are others
featured in the painting, however, whose inventions
were more ambivalentmost notably Samuel Colt (the
revolving gun).
Figure 1: Christian Schussele’s Men of Progress (1857).
Colt’s legacy is informative, since his success in selling
a particularly questionable agenda was built on the
exploitation of novel techniques that highlight how
power can be acquired, manipulated, and maintained.
Colt pioneered bold and innovative marketing methods,
such as commissioning artist George Catlin to produce a
series of paintings that romanticised the use of Colt
weapons in exotic scenes with wild animals, native
Americans, and bandits (Houze, Cooper, and
Kornhauser 2006: 203). He also solicited the support of
government officials and other prominent individuals by
giving them custom engraved weapons. The historian
Barbara M. Tucker has suggested that through his
marketing techniques Colt transformed the firearm from
a basic utilitarian object into a central symbol of
American patriotism (Tucker 2008).
The twentieth century saw a refinement and
proliferation of similar methods of public manipulation,
perhaps best exemplified by Norman Bel Geddes’s
Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
The installation featured a 35,738 square foot (3320 m2)
model depicting a utopian vision of America set 25
years in the future. The technology that inspired Bel
Geddes’s proposal was the internal combustion engine,
his client General Motors’ core product. He designed
super highways to connect America’s cities,
revolutionary run-offs allowing the cars to join and
leave the motorways without slowing down, and the
sprawl of a perfect picket-fenced suburbia.
For visitors whose outlook had been influenced by the
Great Depression, this future was compelling. It was a
place that was clearly better than the present, and
American consumers bought into the dream. As a result,
many aspects of Futurama became reality. Futurama
was of course motivated by other interests than simply
creating a better future, not least the selling of a
particular political and corporate agendainterests that
No 7 (2017): Nordes 2017; Design + Power, Oslo, www.nordes.org 3
are strikingly revealed in E. L. Doctorow’s 1985 novel
World’s Fair. As a family leaves the ride, the father
says:
‘“It is a wonderful vision, all those highways and all those
radio-driven cars. Of course, highways are built with public
money,” he said after a moment. “When the time comes
General Motors isn’t going to build the highways, the federal
government is. With money from us taxpayers.” He smiled.
“So General Motors is telling us what they expect from us: we
must build them the highways so they can sell us the cars.”’
(Doctorow 1985: 285).
Futurama provides a valuable historical lesson, in that
through hindsight we can compare the promise of a
corporate future with the reality that came to pass.
Highways were built and millions of cars were sold. But
Bel Geddes’s visiona vision constrained by his role as
a designer working for a corporate client with the brief
to glamourise and sell the technologyneglected to
present obvious shortcomings. These shortcomings
included not only traffic jams, smog, accidents, and
road rage, but also more complex societal consequences
such as insurance fraud or the decline of cities that
relied on automobile manufacturing.
Far from being simply positive, then, technological
progress is often problematic in complex and
unforeseen ways. This point has been argued many
times in the past: by William Blake and the Romantics,
William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, and
by avant-garde provocateurs like Dada. Yet somehow,
as Winner (2010) noted, the real-life implications of
technology are easily overwhelmed by the seductive
power of a well-crafted techno-utopia such as Futurama.
Herein lies the oblique constraint: designers, whether
working for clients on market-focused projects or in
research-based roles on public engagement, are seldom
encouraged to explore what could go wrong with a
particular emerging technology or its products.
Negativity does not sell. Progress dogma has the effect
of constraining designers under its power to present
only positive outcomes.
Reconstraining progress dogma facilitates a different
approach to utopian future narratives by accepting that
when a new technology is released into the world things
also inevitably go wrong. The method might be
described as follows:
1. Arrange emerging (not yet available)
technological ‘elements’ to hypothesise future
products and artefacts.
2. Apply alternative plans, motivations, or
ideologies to those currently driving
technological development in order to facilitate
new arrangements of existing elements.
3. Develop new perspectives on big systems.
With the purpose of:
1. Asking what is a better future (or present).
2. Generating a better understanding of the
potential implications of a specific (disruptive)
technology in various contexts and on multiple
scaleswith a particular focus on everyday
life.
3. Moving design ‘upstream’ to not simply
package technology at the end of the
technological journey but to impact and
influence that journey from its genesis.
Ultimately the aim is to facilitate a more responsible
approach to the technological future. One early example
is ‘Audio Tooth Implant’ (Auger-Loizeau 2001), which
examined the implications of implantable technology
for human enhancement by proposing possible
applications and access points for technology to enter
the body. Building on the growing popularity of mobile
telephones at the time, the resulting product was an
implantable telephone. The project was presented at the
Science Museum in London in an exhibition called
‘Future Products’. From here it quickly entered the
public domain through both the popular press and
specialist media.
The reconstraint of progress dogma means critical
responses become equally relevant to positive ones,
with the discussion raised by dissemination being the
key output of such a project. As Rachel Metz wrote in
Wired:
Auger and Loizeau measure success by reactions to their
idea, not the venture capital money (which Auger said they
turned down) that stemmed from the swell of media coverage.
What gratifies them are the hundreds of e-mails they received
from people (including several dentists) interested in learning
more, and a Slashdot mention that garnered 437 comments.
(Metz 2006).
The goal is to add a space for considered appraisal that
predicts what might go wrong with a design before a
product is made available to a wider public. This
approach essentially tests applications before they
happen, building in a layer of responsibility and
allowing for adjustments to be made rather than dealing
with problems after the event.
FUTURE NUDGE
Product lineages are often mistakenly imbued with an
evolutionary logic that gives them the appearance of
rightness and inevitability. Comparisons between, or
conflations of, natural and technological evolution have
been made as far back as the nineteenth century, when
Charles Darwin first published his theory of evolution
(Darwin 2009). This revolutionary work inspired
philosophers, writers and anthropologists such as Marx
and Engels, Samuel Butler and Augustus Pitt-Rivers to
suggest that technological artefacts evolve in a manner
similar to natural organisms. There are, however, key
differences between biological and technological
evolution, including the role humans play in shaping
change. As George Basalla points out when describing
4
the difference between the theories of Darwin and
Marx:
In Darwin’s theory biological evolution was self-generating;
in the Marxian scheme the evolution of technology is not self-
generating but is a process directed by wilful, conscious,
active people and molded by historical forces.(Basalla, 1989:
207).
This description bears a resemblance to ‘artificial
selection’, the term Darwin himself used in ‘Variation
under domestication’, the opening chapter of On the
Origin of Species:
One of the most remarkable features in our domesticated
races is that we see in them adaptation, not indeed to the
animal’s or plant’s own good, but to man’s use or fancy.
(Darwin 2009: 18).
Other attempts at achieving an understanding of
technological evolution have been put forward, most
notably Gilbert Simondon’s seminal work On the Mode
of Existence of Technical Objects (Simondon 1958), and
Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time: The fault of
Epimetheus (Stiegler 1998). For the purposes of this
paper, however, a more appropriate method of
classification is one proposed by Basalla that
emphasises the value of the artefact:
A theory of evolution cannot exist without demonstrated
connections between the basic units that constitute its universe
of discourse. In technology those units are artefacts ... it
becomes apparent that every novel artefact has an antecedent.
This claim holds true for the simplest stone implement and for
machines as complex as cotton gins and steam engines.
(Basalla 1989: 208).
From the design perspective the artefact approach is
appealing. This is because technology can be viewed
simply as a means to an endthe systems, techniques
and materials that support the existence and function of
the product. Technological progress, therefore,
facilitates the iterative development of the lineage.
Figure 2a (left) and 2b (right) magnify the incremental design steps
that result in the artificial evolution of a product.
We describe this kind of incremental technological
change as future nudge, that is, a process that appears to
be evolutionary but in fact is not random, and is
therefore not evolutionary. The automobile provides a
good example. As Figure 2a shows, travel becomes
instrumentalised as we focus on the object rather than
the act of travelling. The car iterates in small steps made
possible by advances in specific areas, similar to the
development of mobile devices such as the iPhone
(Figure 2b)—seven phones in seven yearswhere each
new device is a small advancement on the previous one.
The typical progression follows Moore’s Lawsmaller,
more powerful, more efficientand has been successful
in generating new sales revenue with new models
released each year. Describing the way technology and
technological products evolve, so that what comes next
will be similar to what came before, the economist
Robert Heilbroner wrote:
All inventions and innovations, by definition, represent an
advance of the art beyond existing base lines. Yet, most
advances, particularly in retrospect, appear essentially
incremental, evolutionary. If nature makes no sudden leaps,
neither, it would appear, does technology.(Heilbroner 1967:
9).
In this process we can only design what the product
could realistically evolve into. Smart products, for
example, are usually existing products simply updated
with ‘smart’ technology.
Precisely because future nudge is an artificial form of
selection, we can use it to explore who decides, and who
makes the future, both historically and in the present. In
the past, for example, the lobbying power of automobile
companies held sway over America’s future, as
evidenced in the Futurama exhibit discussed above.
Unpacking power relations in future nudge is tricky: it
is partially a faux-force, a lack of imagination;
instrumentalised thinking coupled with a blinkering of
alternative possibilities and other ways of life.
One approach to reconstraining future nudge is to use
counterfactual histories (Bunzl 2004) and alternative
presentsboth of which provide insight into how
certain aspects of life might look if different choices had
been made or different paths were taken in the pastto
imagine what might happen if we stepped out of an
existing product lineage. Another Auger-Loizeau work,
the 2003 ‘Iso-phone’ (Figure 3), was developed to
challenge the telecommunication industry’s progression
towards efficiency and ubiquity through the growth of
the mobile telephone sector. The question the project
asked was, what if, rather than directing development
towards availability and mobility, designers prioritised a
qualitative approach to focus on the experience. The
concept used sensory deprivation techniques to
minimise distractions, facilitating a total focus on the
conversation.
The question where agency in artificial selection is
concerned is, who chooses? Who makes the decisions?
How do we ‘take back control’, in that much abused
phrase? How can we use a speculative approach to
imagine new coordinates and new constraintsand thus
escape a naturalised view of technological evolution as
something no one controls? At present, stepping outside
the forward march of future nudge is a privilege of the
wealthy. This is satirised in ‘An Ikea Catalogue From
the Near Future’ (Near Future Laboratory 2015), where
No 7 (2017): Nordes 2017; Design + Power, Oslo, www.nordes.org 5
the most expensive sofa, called the ‘Nostalgi’, is
described as being reassuringly not ‘smart’while
everyone else is sold the next micro-iteration of a
predictable product line.
Figure 3: Auger-Loizeau’s ‘Iso-Phone’ is a solution focused on the
experience and not the efficiency of communication.
MEANS AND ENDS
In 1927 Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers made the
following (now infamous) statement:
We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture.
People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even
before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a
new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his
needs.(Quoted in Curtis 2002).
The statement, made during an interview with the
Harvard Business Review, signals the rise of
conspicuous consumption and the worship of gadgets.
Designers were, and still are, complicit in this process.
The philosopher Albert Borgmann has another way of
describing this historic shift in emphasis, through what
is known as his ‘device paradigm’. For Borgmann,
things are inseparable from their context: we engage and
interact with them in their worlds. Devices, on the other
hand, unburden us of their contexts through the
operation of complex background machinery; the more
advanced the technology, the more invisible or
concealed the machinery. Borgmann used the fireplace
or hearth as an example of a thing: it provides a focal
point for the household, links people to the local terrain
through the gathering of firewood, and demands an idea
of how much wood is required to get through the winter.
In contrast, the central heating system ‘procures mere
warmth and disburdens us of all the other elements’,
while the means become invisible, intangible, controlled
and managed by others (Borgmann 1984: 42).
Designers and consumers alike have become obsessed
with the end, the devicethe glossy and glamorous
productwhile the systems that produce these ends
have become increasingly opaque. This pathway
essentially leads to automation, where devices (such as
the Nest thermostat) satisfy all of our needs as
efficiently as possible through techniques such as
machine learning and prediction algorithms. Jean
Baudrillard was already describing the effects of
automation in the 1960s when he wrote (in The System
of Objects) about the passivity of the modern consumer:
When it becomes automatic … its function is fulfilled,
certainly, but it is also hermetically sealed. Automatism
amounts to a closing-off, to a sort of functional self-
sufficiency which exiles man to the irresponsibility of a mere
spectator.(Baudrillard 2005: 118).
Figure 4: Open hardware vacuum cleaner by Tom Lynch.
The perfect example of a device is Yves Behar’s $700
Juicero, a juicer that uses QR code and a Wi-Fi
connection to check fruit packs for freshness and refuses
to operate if the system determines that the fruit is out
of date. Such examples epitomise the consumer goods
industry’s current habit of steering consumers towards
the end, giving the designed artefact an almost religious
status in contemporary society. This has allowed the
means to go ignored, to remain hidden, unquestioned or
undetected. Bespoke tamperproof screws, non-
accessible batteries, warranty seals, technology telling
us when our fruit is fresh, intentional and increasingly
rapid obsolescencethese practices are becoming the
norm.
By removing the constraint of end-focus, designers can
reclaim the means on behalf of their products and the
people who use them. Solutions can be adapted to local
terrains or can engage with local systems, materials and
making. Figure 4, for example, shows an open-source
hardware vacuum cleaner designed by Tom Lynch. All
6
elements were sourced or made locally and the whole
process was documented on the project’s wikithe
result being a fully functional and replicable product for
under 50.
INFRASTRAINTS
Infrastructural and legacy constraints inform almost
everything we do and everything we designfrom food
systems to transport, manufacturing to entertainment.
We are locked into paths determined by decisions or
choices made in previous eras, when the world was a
much different place. For various reasons these legacies
stubbornly persist through time, constraining future
possibilities and blinkering us from alternative ways of
thinking.
The remainder of this paper will focus on the subject of
energy. Tesla’s invention of alternating current at the
end of the nineteenth century won out over Edison’s
direct current because it allowed electricity to be
transmitted over large distances. This afforded the
building of huge power stations in the countryside,
generating power through the burning of fossil fuels and
distributing it radially across national grid systems.
Power arrives as if by magic at our houses via sockets in
the walls. These sockets, and the plugs that are inserted
into them, dictate how all electrical products are used
and how all products are designed.
We have been thinking about how to change this
relationshiphow to reconstrain our approach to
energy. The island we live on, as a location with ample
sun, wind, rain, and sea, would seem to be a place
where renewable approaches to energy might thrive.
What you see when you fly over the island supports that
notion: banks of solar photovoltaic panels line several of
the hillsides, and wind farms are exposed to the full
force of the gales blowing in from the sea. However,
beneath this optimistic surface lies a darker reality.
The problem, stated simply, is as follows. Solar PVs
only generate energy while the sun shines. Wind farms
generate energy when the wind blows. The wind is
unpredictable and the sun shines during the day when
most people are at work, meaning that energy cannot
realistically be consumed in real time. The only viable
option at the moment is to sell energy back to the grid;
but unfortunately this conflicts with the power
company’s business model. As things stand, users of
renewables still rely on the grid during dark or windless
periods, and therefore utility owners arguewith some
reasonthat these users should pay for grid upkeep.
So while the infrastructure battle continues, what else
can be done? We decided to reimagine energy
infrastructure on our island based on the implementation
of renewables. This brings us to the second part of the
paper: reconstraining energy through locally based
bespoke design solutions.
ENERGY RECONSTRAINED: RECENT WORK
As technology advances it becomes increasingly
concealed, hidden in complex systems, its actions
determined by invisible algorithms or unseen actors. In
Borgmann’s terms, this has the effect of dislocating
ends from means. As outlined above, the present
tendency is for designers and consumers alike to focus
on the instrumental endthe object of desirewhile
ignoring the means, the obscure and complex
infrastructures that allow the device to work. Nothing
illustrates this estrangement of means and ends better
than our attitude towards energy. Electricity, as a form
of energy, comes through sockets on the wall that
deliver a seemingly endless supply. These ubiquitous
and generic sockets determine the design of every
electrical product, providing a neat end to the designer’s
role and responsibility. Our lives are energy rich, but
our relationship with energy is threadbareethereal and
distant, a number on a meter, a bill at the end of the
month.
In our community-centred approach to energy we aim to
break down the wall. One example of a design approach
that goes through the walland out of the boxis the
Zimbabwe Bush Pump (de Laet and Mol 2000). The
assembly for this clean water pump contains
instructions for the whole community, all of whom are
involved in the installation. The pump is designed to be
robust but also fluid in its components, so that if one
component breaks it can be replaced with something to
hand. Our project is similarly committed to designing a
thing that solves a problem such as energy storage, but
does so using local materials, the local environment,
local people and their skills.
Our first in a series of working prototypes, the Gravity
Battery, is an open source energy generation and storage
solution. It is built from a combination of natural
materials, which provide a source of energy or a means
to store energy, and cultural materials, such as tools,
artefacts, and components that are made, recycled, and
re-appropriated. We chose the research space based on
our local context: knowledge, materials, and terrain.
This is an example of a new approach towards
technological application that places an emphasis on
local production over global, community engagement
over alienation, and participation in the design process
over the simple consumption of products.
All parts are sourced or made locally. Solar power lifts
the mass during the daytime, storing it as potential
energy. (The real-life context could be, for example, one
of the local homes that are built on the cliff sides of the
island.) When it is needed the energy is released by
dropping the weight, in this case 15kg, which in turn
rotates the motornow a generatorto produce
electrical energy. The power available is determined by
the size of the dropping mass, the speed at which it
drops, the gearbox ratio, and the drop distance.
The latest iteration (Figure 5) uses a locally found scrap
motorcycle engine as the gearbox, ready-made and
No 7 (2017): Nordes 2017; Design + Power, Oslo, www.nordes.org 7
super efficient, minimising complex making. Normally
the motorcycle engine burns fossil fuel (petrol) to move
the piston down, which is converted to rotary motion
with the crankshaft. Rotary motion (or RPM) is
modified by the gearbox and ultimately rotates the rear
wheel via a chain drive providing forward linear motion
to the motorcycle and rider.
We reverse this situation: instead of fossil fuel, gravity
spins the rear wheel, using it as a pulley attached to the
falling mass. This in turn spins the drive sprocket,
increasing RPM in the gearbox and finally driving the
crankshaft at a speed determined by the selected gear,
the diameter of the pulley, and the falling mass. For
communication purposes we had to think of a use for
the generated energy, so we decided it would power a
self-contained vinyl record player.
In practical terms the gravity battery provides a
demonstration of how means and ends, or products and
their infrastructure, can be reconsidered to facilitate a
more engaging and responsible relationship with
energy. The project is currently in progress: we have
developed several functional prototypes using the
battery in combination with a variety of products such
as record players, lights and kitchen devices to explore
how interactions change. The next stage is to move into
local communities to test the concept in the wild.
Figure 5: Example of reconstrained design: the Gravity Battery.
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
The four categories we have identified and examined in
this paperprogress dogma, future nudge, means and
ends, and infrastraintsare not meant to represent a
fully comprehensive list of oblique constraints. Part of
our future work will consist of identifying and analysing
further constraints and finding the means to rethink or
work around them. By reconstraining design with new
sets of coordinates, we hope to create a space in which it
becomes possible to apply plans, motivations, or
ideologies that are different to those currently driving
technological developmentin order, ultimately, to
facilitate new arrangements of existing elements and to
develop new perspectives on large-scale systems.
As we described in the second part, our current work is
with renewable energy. By thinking about what lies
beyond the walllocal contexts, landscapes, materials,
skills, cultureit becomes possible to develop bespoke
solutions which question existing power relations and
envision preferable futures. Where we live in Europe,
local terrain means cliffs and cliff-side communities.
This local terrain has already provided inspiration for
one solutionthe gravity batteryto grid storage issues
that problematise solar panels. The most striking aspect
of the gravity battery design is the tangible relationship
that it affords with energy. Turning up the volume on
the gravity-powered record player makes the mass fall
faster, reducing the time available to listen to the music.
(In the immediate next steps we plan to boil a kettle,
toast some bread, power a reading lamp, and so on.)
Looking further ahead, we are working on a book of one
hundred alternative energy ideas. The concepts in this
book will range from small operational prototypes such
as our low-power gravity battery, which exploits the
vertical nature of the island, to more spectacular and
ambitious concepts such as a huge series of elevators in
the capital city.
REFERENCES
Curtis, A. 2002. The Century of the Self. London, UK:
BBC.
Basalla, G. 1989. The Evolution of Technology,
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Baudrillard, J. 2005. The System of Objects, London:
Verso.
Borgmann, A. 1984. Technology and the Character of
Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bunzl, M. 2004. ‘Counterfactual History: A User's
Guide’. American Historical Review, vol. 109, no.
3 (June), pp. 845-858.
Darwin, C. 2009. On the Origin of Species. London:
Penguin.
de Laet, M., and A. Mol. 2000. ‘The Zimbabwe Bush
Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology’, Social
Studies of Science, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 225-263.
Doctorow, E. L. 1985. World's Fair, New York:
Random House.
Eames, C. 1972. ‘Design Q & A’. Retrieved 10 March
2017 from http://www.eamesoffice.com/the-
work/design-q-a-text/
Eurasia Group. 2016. ‘Top Risks for 2016.’ Retrieved
22 March 2017 from
https://www.eurasiagroup.net/siteFiles/News/EGpu
blishestoprisks.pdf
Heilbroner, R. 1967. ‘Do Machines Make History?’ In
8
D. Kaplan, ed., Readings in the Philosophy of
Technology, Oxford, UK: Rowman & Littlefield,
7-15.
Houze, H., C. Cooper, and E. Kornhauser. 2006. Samuel
Colt: Arms, Art, and Invention, New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Metz, R. ‘Lying Through Their Teeth’. Wired, 4
December 2006.
Miller, C. ‘The Long-Term Jobs Killer is Not
Automation. It’s China.’ New York Times,
December 21, 2016.
Near Future Laboratory. 2015. ‘An Ikea Catalog From
the Near Future.’ Retrieved 28 March 2017 from
http://ikea.nearfuturelaboratory.com
Simondon, G. 2016. On the Mode of Existence of
Technical Objects, Minneapolis, MN: Univocal
Publishing.
Stiegler, B. 1998. Technics and Time: The fault of
Epimetheus, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Tucker, B., and K. Tucker. 2008. Industrializing
Antebellum America: The Rise of Manufacturing
Entrepreneurs in the Early Republic, New York:
Macmillan.
Winner, L. 2010. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search
for Limits in an Age of High Technology, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
... In this paper, we use speculative design [1] as a way to imagine a co-creative scenario, that involves interaction with the hidden representations of a generative AI. More specifically, we imagine a reconstrained design [2] by combining existing technological elements, namely generative AI and feature visualization, to give human users a better sense of how a generative model's design space is constructed. By asking How can interacting with hidden layers affect our experience of generative models?, we aim to investigate whether feature visualization can expand the horizonal relation at play when co-creating with generative AI. ...
... Speculative design can serve as a method to overcome preconceptions and dogmas underlying technological development [2]. A characteristic of the recent development of generative AI is that we tend to compare the models' functionality to humans and expect similar behavior. ...
... However, as AI models come with inherently different capabilities from humans, we risk restricting their development to one stringent direction without asking what novel modes of co-creation the technology might bring to the table. By recognizing the constraints underlying our thinking when imagining new technological applications, we might imagine 'alternative presents' in a reconstrained world [2]. One practical aspect differentiating generative models from human brains is that one can 'look inside' them by printing out the activation on its layers. ...
Preprint
Full-text available
This paper presents a speculation on a fictive co-creation scenario that extends classical interaction patterns with generative models. While existing interfaces are restricted to the input and output layers, we suggest hidden layer interaction to extend the horizonal relation at play when co-creating with a generative model's design space. We speculate on applying feature visualization to manipulate neurons corresponding to features ranging from edges over textures to objects. By integrating visual representations of a neural network's hidden layers into co-creation, we aim to provide humans with a new means of interaction, contributing to a phenomenological account of the model's inner workings during generation.
... While convenience in itself is not inherently problematic, it represents a metaperspective of the world's wicked problems and may hold negative implications at multiple levels: psychological [4], socio-economical and political [9] and ecological [16,22], among others. To visualize the implications of convenience and to investigate the design opportunities (e.g., design patterns, interaction paradigms) that may reveal from removing convenience as a "constraint" [1], we propose Inconvenient Design as a conceptual and methodological framing and as the basis for a didactic concept for design education. ...
... The inconvenient approach to design strongly builds on current discourses and practices on new forms of critical and speculative inquiries within HCI and interaction design research that address the gray area between "affirmative" and "critical" design [3,8,15]. Related work includes the conceptual framings of material speculations [24], research products [17] and the critical artifact methodology [6]; the critical framework of reconstrained design [1] and interaction design research on provocations [2,18], frictions [13], limitations [19] and discomfort [20]. ...
Presentation
Full-text available
There is a prevalent obsession in design-oriented disciplines and in the technological industry with comfort, efficiency, smoothness and smartness, which relates to a trend of envisioning super-convenient futures. In this paper, we raise convenience as a topic for inquiry within critical design practice and affirm the importance of questioning the broad implications of "design for convenience" in design research and design education. To this end, we investigate the potential of Inconvenient Design as a discursive and critical approach. By combining prototyping with tactics of critical and speculative design, we build a methodology that aims to push designers beyond their "comfortable human perspective", engaging them to question current practices in design and to think about alternatives. This methodology was the starting point of "Stranger Things-Prototyping Inconvenience", a design course held at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. The key insights and reflections from this course are summarized and illustrated through the results of the iterative prototyping sessions as well as the final projects completed by the graduate and undergraduate students.
... This form of incremental technological development is described by Auger et al. as the "future nudge." 45 As technologies are increasingly embedded in our lives, questions regarding the visions behind such concepts as well as the justification of their visions should be fundamental to any development process. Moreover, while it is often difficult to imagine how given developments could affect our environments and day-to-day lives, opening such critical inquiries to those most impacted by future scenarios (e.g., citizens, diverse groups), and conducting them outside corporations and corporation-impacted consortia, could help in shaping preferable futures. ...
Article
Full-text available
The design of sociotechnical futures relies on institutionalized visions but also on material artifacts. In this context, prototypes are a materialized means of exploration of potential futures. This article explores interdependencies between irritations by prototypes and critical/speculative design and argues that prototypes problematize a balance between feasibility and their potential for irritation, i.e. being incited to act differently by a prototype that does not fit into familiar practices (e.g. flying cars). We investigate the significance of the feasibility-irritation tension, first, by analyzing two case studies of prototypes from urban mobility as examples of technical feasibility in marketing and testing environments, and second, by contrasting them to the notion of prototypes as deliberately irritating artifacts within critical and speculative design practices. We offer a perspective for understanding their transformative potential. Our discussion shows how prototypes, as they are used in speculative design, might open new negotiation spaces instead of limiting futures to what seems feasible. New, irritating prototypes highlight a contingency, which is necessary to openly discussing feasible and fictional futures together.
... In Social Design this happens explicitly in terms of incorporating social activism, for example in games, urban investigations, and the development of collaboration systems (Flanagan & Nissenbaum, 2007;Markussen, 2013;. This also happens implicitly, as in the perpetuation of legacy engineering thinking that constrains designers' imagination and construction of potential futures (Auger, Hanna, & Encinas, 2017) or the reification of social psychology concepts in design practices and artifacts (Siegel & Dray, 2019). ...
Thesis
Full-text available
Design has the potential to disrupt the status quo, yet disruption inevitably introduces new conflicts. One of the challenges of Social Design is to navigate the social, political and material conflicts that define contemporary lives and find new ways to transform them into creative resources. In addressing that challenge this thesis investigates agonism, a multifaceted theory that explicates conflict and grounds the need for such an investigation in design activism. The political implications, practical considerations and design potentials of agonism are examined in detail, and three core principles of agonism are defined: Identities, Dialogues and Agonistic Space. These principles are elaborated through their relation to intersubjectivity as a fundamental aspect of human experience, its interactional role in identity formation and communication, and its influence on the production and performance of space. A Constructive Design Research methodology is employed that contributes to the understanding agonism through a series of research trajectories and interventions. Design strategies to enact agonism are proposed around game, play and interaction design: Identities can be investigated through Role-Playing, Dialogues can be initiated through Storytelling, and Agonistic Space can be manifested as a Third Place. These strategies are field tested to examine various communities and the conflicts within them. A game intervention Mind the Gap confronts the endemic problem of the gender gap in academic and professional communities of ICT and STEM. A research intervention takes agonistic perspectives to elucidate conflicts of European migration and participatory urban planning in a neighbourhood community in the U.K. A digital intervention applies agonism towards engaging a platform community that has no material form, in the online project of commonfare.net. These interventions experiment with creative inquiry, game and play as design speculations, sketching and constructing playful inerventions that engage participants in agonism, to enact challenges to the status quo and illuminate potential solutions to complex societal issues. The utility and outcomes of the principles and strategies are evaluated with a focus on emergent intersubjectivity through Dialogic Syntax and Critical Discourse Analyses of gameplay, narratives and design artifacts. The main contributions of this thesis are its shift from empathic perspectives to intersubjectivity in design research, and its operationalization of the theory of agonism for Social Design. Secondary contributions include the elaboration of game and play as design speculation that includes critical reflections on their real-world practices, and the artifact Mind the Gap which has evolved from prototype to a co-created, community driven experience that continues to engage people in meaningful dialogues that challenge the status quo of the gender gap. 4
... In "Politics of Power" (2016), Automato.Farm conceptualised multiplugs that demonstrate differences in the ideology of designers, engineers and stakeholders in energy usage: the D-model represents a democratic, self-balancing network; the T-model is centralised by a leader who can shut down the system; and the M-model supports monarch firmwares and hierarchical functionalities. Auger, Hanna and Encinas designed the Gravity Battery (2017) which combines natural and cultural materials that are made, recycled, and re-appropriated as an expression of their concept of Reconstrained Design [4]. These examples provide insights into how design can help surface critical issues around energy distribution, beyond communicating or building on the capability of these systems. ...
Conference Paper
Technologies such as blockchains, smart contracts and programmable batteries facilitate emerging models of energy distribution, trade and consumption, and generate a considerable number of opportunities for energy markets. However, these developments complicate relationships between stakeholders, disrupting traditional notions of value, control and ownership. Discussing these issues with the public is particularly challenging as energy consumption habits often obscure the competing values and interests that shape stakeholders' relationships. To make such difficult discussions more approachable and examine the missing relational aspect of autonomous energy systems, we combined the design of speculative hairdryers with performance and deliberation. This integrated method of inquiry makes visible the competing values and interests, eliciting people's wishes to negotiate these terms. We argue that the complexity of mediated energy distribution and its convoluted stakeholder relationships requires more sophisticated methods of inquiry to engage people in debates concerning distributed energy systems.
Article
Full-text available
This article explores the role of the future in contemporary technology design, and elaborates how imagination can influence the present through the mechanism of speculation. Three applications of futures are introduced: extrapolation examines present data and trends to predict possible futures, reflecting on the present imagines possible futures for insights on current practices, while backcasting visualizes a preferred future and plots a trajectory from the present to achieve it. Design speculations for Ocean Wave Energy capture systems are presented that illustrate the shaping of the future with conceptual prototypes, and a future narrative when humanity has averted a climate catastrophe.
Article
Full-text available
If the ecosystems that we are part of and rely on are to flourish, we must urgently transform how we live, and how we imagine living. Design education has a critical role to play in this transformation, as design is a materially engaged, world-building activity. Design is complicit in the problems we are facing, and informs and shapes how people live. In this article, I seed ideas about design research education for global challenges. I speak to the merits of post-disciplinary and hybrid strategies, and look to science for clues about how to respond to twenty-first-century challenges through design. I posit sustainability brokering as a new pathway for design, and anticipating alternative futures as a critical step in developing transformative innovation. I then propose participatory research through design as a foundational methodology; describe four pillars of practice to scaffold sophisticated research at undergraduate and master’s level; and lay out a work plan for building research capacity in a doctoral school. Through this process, I articulate core skills that design researchers will likely require if they are to contribute to global challenges constructively. My aim is to seed fruitful regenerative discussion with these propositions.
Article
Full-text available
A current topic of Human-Computer Interaction focuses on understanding and assessing user-centered design taking into account certain psychological factors related to users’ thought processes, feelings and behavior into account. In particular, personality is an idiosyncratic psychological construct that captures many of such aspects from a user. It allows designers to provide a better user experience by adapting a user interface to individual characteristics. This review presents the impact of design and aesthetics on user preferences, namely considering whether certain personality traits have a preference for specific interface design features. This review also discusses the implications of personality-based user interface design, before moving on to the presentation of several research projects focused on adapted design for personality types. Finally, the review highlights trends and future directions in this domain, with particular emphasis on brain-computer interfaces.
Chapter
Elevator energy storage systems provide reliable energy storage using the gravitational potential energy of elevators. The chapter provides evidence that harnessing the gravity of existing infrastructure is economically, environmentally, and socially more responsible than its competitors (large scale hydraulic and lithium battery storage). EESS proposes a heterodox approach to individuals' relationships with power systems. By the use of existing capital to provide power storage, the capitalist cycle, which constructs new capital for the sake of monetary growth, is disrupted. The next generation of energy storage will look to re-constrain its parameters of acceptability on the grounds of environmental and social impact rather than efficiency and megawatt output.
Chapter
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
Article
In this paper we investigate the intricacies of an admirable water pumping device - the Zimbabwe Bush Pump `B' type - so as to find out what makes it an `appropriate technology'. This turns out to be what we call the `fluidity' of the pump (of its boundaries, or of its working order, and of its maker). We find that in travelling to intractable places, an object that isn't too rigorously bounded, that doesn't impose itself but tries to serve, that is adaptable, flexible and responsive - in short, a fluid object - may well prove to be stronger than one which is firm. By analyzing the success and failure of this device, its agency and the way in which it shapes new configurations in the Zimbabwean socio-technical landscape, we partake in the current move in science and technology studies to transform what it means to be an actor. And by mobilizing the term love for articulating our relation to the Bush Pump, we try to contribute to shaping novel ways of `doing' normativity.
Book
Presents an evolutionary theory of technological change based on recent scholarship in the history of technology and on relevant material drawn from economic history and anthropology. Challenges the popular notion that technological advances arise from the efforts of a few heroic individuals who produce a series of revolutionary inventions that owe little or nothing to the technological past. Therefore, the book’s argument is shaped by analogies drawn selectively from the theory of organic evolution, and not from the theory and practice of political revolution. Three themes appear, with variations, throughout the study. The first is diversity: an acknowledgment of the vast numbers of different kinds of made things (artifacts) that long have been available to humanity. The second theme is necessity: the mistaken belief that humans are driven to invent new artifacts in order to meet basic biological needs such as food, shelter, and defense. And the third theme is technological evolution: an organic analogy that explains both the emergence of the novel artifacts and their subsequent selection by society for incorporation into its material life without invoking either biological necessity or technological process.
Article
What is a technical object? At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature, which had within themselves a beginning of movement and rest, and man-made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves. This book, the first of three volumes, revises the Aristotelian argument and develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own. The Aristotelian concept persisted, in one form or another, until Marx, who conceived of the possibility of an evolution of technics. Lodged between mechanics and biology, a technical entity became a complex of heterogeneous forces. In a parallel development, while industrialization was in the process of overthrowing the contemporary order of knowledge as well as contemporary social organization, technology was acquiring a new place in philosophical questioning. Philosophy was for the first time faced with a world in which technical expansion was so widespread that science was becoming more and more subject to the field of instrumentality, with its ends determined by the imperatives of economic struggle or war, and with its epistemic status changing accordingly. The power that emerged from this new relation was unleashed in the course of the two world wars. Working his way through the history of the Aristotelian assessment of technics, the author engages the ideas of a wide range of thinkers—Rousseau, Husserl, and Heidegger, the paleo-ontologist Leroi-Gourhan, the anthropologists Vernant and Detienne, the sociologists Weber and Habermas, and the systems analysts Maturana and Varela.
Article
"The questions he poses about the relationship between technical change and political power are pressing ones that can no longer be ignored, and identifying them is perhaps the most a nascent 'philosophy of technology' can expect to achieve at the present time."—David Dickson, New York Times Book Review "The Whale and the Reactor is the philosopher's equivalent of superb public history. In its pages an analytically trained mind confronts some of the most pressing political issues of our day."—Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Isis